I Don’t Dream: New Year’s Resolutions Don’t Make Sense to Me
Photo by Chris Gilbert on Unsplash
Happy New Year, dear reader.
I trust that by the time you read this, people across the world will have completed their annual act of collective delusion. Fireworks will have been launched with the solemnity of a moral achievement, champagne consumed as though fermented grapes were a recognised path to wisdom, and hugs exchanged by people who avoided one another for most of the year but have decided that midnight demands reconciliation. Social media, that tireless chaperone of modern life, will be brimming with declarations of renewal, as though the calendar were not merely a tool of organisation but a benevolent deity capable of personal reform.
Midnight on December thirty-first is treated as a kind of secular absolution. We cross the threshold believing that time itself has agreed to wipe its memory, forgetting our habits, indulgences, and half-hearted attempts at self-improvement. People resolve to eat better, love more generously, spend less money, and become emotionally available, all within the same twelve-month window.
And yet I have never been able to participate, not because I lack ambition, imagination, or a working sense of irony, but because the New Year has always struck me as an impressively organised fiction. Calendar dates are ingenious tools for scheduling meetings and missing deadlines, but they are woefully unsuited to moral renovation. The sun rises on January first with the same indifference it displayed the day before. Time does not reset. It advances, mildly irritated by our insistence that it should behave differently.
Had this observation come from a more habitually cynical friend Clifford, I might have dismissed it as the cynicism for which he is known. In truth, however, it is not cynicism at all, but a courtesy to reality. I understand the longing for renewal, the hope that tomorrow might be kinder than today if only we announce it with sufficient confidence. What I question is our faith in dates to do the work of self-knowledge. Time heals nothing on its own. Truth does that, slowly, often inconveniently, and usually without consulting our intentions. Most resolutions are born not of clarity but of mild self-annoyance. We resolve to change not because we understand ourselves deeply, but because we are temporarily embarrassed by who we were last year.
Capitalism, sensing an opportunity, enters the scene with admirable timing. Having persuaded us that change begins on January first, it immediately offers the appropriate equipment. Stationery shops become sites of moral aspiration. Notebooks appear thick with promise, their pages immaculate, their covers whispering discipline, coherence, and a better personality. Journals are purchased not because we lack paper, but because we lack reassurance. Pens are upgraded, planners colour-coded, highlighters deployed with surgical precision. The implication is subtle but firm: transformation is deeply personal, but it will go much better if you invest in the correct supplies.
If the self is unfinished, perhaps the right notebook will finish it.
I once believed this wholeheartedly. I drew up lists each January with admirable seriousness: achieve this, correct that, finally arrive at a more impressive version of myself. Life, displaying its usual irreverence, declined to cooperate. Some ambitions succeeded, others failed, and a few revealed themselves to be misunderstandings entirely. Along the way, I learned that providence does not consult my calendar before unfolding its intentions and feels no obligation to respect January, or indeed any month at all.
So I stopped saying, “This year, I will,” and began saying, “Today, I will try.” Discipline, I discovered, does not arrive at midnight accompanied by fireworks. It appears quietly on an ordinary afternoon, when nothing feels symbolic, no one is watching, and you decide to persist anyway.
I no longer dream grandly; I live deliberately. The future is not a destination to be chased but a structure assembled gradually through attention to the present. We speak incessantly of becoming, but neglect the quiet discipline of being. Some prefer to reinvent themselves every January; I would rather continue, imperfectly, from where I already stand.
This is sometimes described as pessimism. I experience it as relief. When one stops venerating the calendar, one also stops fearing time. Worth is no longer measured in milestones, progress no longer imagined as a race. Life reveals itself instead as a rhythm, complete with pauses, detours, and small, uncelebrated successes that attract no public applause.
So no, I do not dream in years anymore. I live in days. I try to write with greater care, pray with grace, forgive with fewer conditions. I attempt kindness even when it is inconvenient and learning even when understanding comes slowly
The world adores declarations, but quiet persistence tends to outlast performance. When asked for my New Year’s resolution, I usually reply that I have none. I am merely continuing what I began yesterday, with slightly more awareness and slightly less urgency.
Perhaps the truest form of growth is not reinvention but endurance: the willingness to show up after falling short, to find meaning in the ordinary, and to choose grace over spectacle.
So, as another year begins with promise and pressure, I shall be somewhere in the middle of the moment, content, unhurried, and grateful. I remain the same person you encountered yesterday, still unfinished, still learning, still suspicious of deadlines imposed by celestial bookkeeping. If this strikes you as unsuitably festive, I can only plead consistency. I have never trusted a system that promises moral transformation overnight, particularly one sponsored by champagne.
And that, dear reader, is quite enough for me.
That said, I do not wish to deprive anyone else of the pleasure. By all means, make your resolutions. Draft them carefully. Revise them generously. Attach timelines if it comforts you. Aim high, aim low, aim vaguely in the direction of improvement. And if you are feeling especially confident, feel free to email me a copy. I promise to read them with great interest, mild admiration, and the quiet understanding of someone who knows how January tends to unfold.
Happy New Year.
