New Years Resolutions Cause Suffering

If you’re like most people, you did one of two things around New Years.

1. Made a resolution that you will probably break by February, and forget all about by March. Heck, it’s the 3rd, maybe you’ve broken it already.

2. Thought it was dumb that people make resolutions on New Years Eve they will only break, so you’ve decided to make a pre-emtive strike and not make a resolution at all. You’ll change not for some arbitrary celebration, but in your own natural timing. Which is to say, never.

I don’t think there’s anything special about January 1st, but it’s as good a day as any to redouble our efforts to not suck at life quite so badly.

Our resolutions (new year’s or otherwise) tend to crash and burn because we get excited about changing, and we expect to ride the high of that excitement long enough to make a difference. But then we barely make it out of the driveway before we run out of gas. It doesn’t help that we are in the midst of an impatient and pleasure-obsessed culture offering distraction at every moment.

Often we write it off our failure to the absence of some substance called “willpower.” But the vagueness of that term only serves our secret desire to not bother with the hard work of self-improvement all while pretending that we really wanted to change. So, forget willpower. Let’s talk fortitude. Plato called fortitude one of the four cardinal virtues which he believed to be the root of all other virtues. Fortitude is simply the ability to confront pain. And the more you confront pain the more fortitude you will get.

This means you should not get any romantic ideas about how you’re going to joyously (and painlessly) blossom into a new person. What you should expect is suffering and lots of it. That’s why when Christians talk about change we say “dying to the self.” That’s why Jesus talks about cutting off hands and plucking out eyes. Extreme language reminds us that refinement of character is not a fun recreational activity to undertake out of boredom. That good feeling of making a decision to change will soon become an awful pain: the terrible burden of some new practice, the unbearable withdrawels from some beloved sin. Expect to suffer and embrace it without whining, and you just might have a chance of changing for real this time. Here’s a couple of related articles I found useful.

Why You Can’t Make That Habit Stick

Forging Habits of Steel

Happy New Years’.