Here We Go Again

Hello, 2019. Here you are. It’s time to start over, start fresh, start anew.

It’s time to make resolutions! To look at where we went wrong last year and learn from it! To do things differently this time around!

…

Pppppppfffffffftttttttt, HA! Oh, that’s so cute.

Some of you may remember from this time last year my particularly dismal view of the ever popular ‘New Year’s Resolution’. To give you a brief recap, I think they’re a ridiculous societal contrivance brought about to make people think they’re goal-setting or being proactively self-improving or whatever other arsingly pep-talkingly vomitworthy linguistic drivel today’s ‘influencers’ like to throw at the viewing masses.

Okay, I suppose that’s a bit harsh. It’s not the concept that annoys me so much as the emphasis that gets placed upon it. It’s just so contrived. “Hey, this arbitrary date we determined to mean something is happening, let’s all be sure to make promises to ourselves that after it we will do things differently--and this time we mean it! For real this year! Really really!” I can’t name a single person I’ve ever known who has made a New Year’s resolution and stuck to it. I’ve known plenty of people who have given it a solid try with the best of intentions, but even the most determined humans are exactly that--human. We try, and we don’t always succeed. In fact, I’d say we don’t succeed far more often than we do. And the real cop-out with New Year’s resolutions is the attitude that if (when) you fail, you can just shrug and say, “Oh well, I’ll do better next year.”

::bangs head repeatedly on desk::

I harped on this last year, too. You don’t have to wait. What’s the point in waiting? If you really wanted to succeed at whatever it is that you resolved to do or be on January first when it was the expected thing to do, you wouldn’t roll over and play dead mid-March. You would stand back and say, “Well, I have lapsed in my resolution, but I am human, and I forgive myself. I will return to this thing, but perhaps with adjusted goals or an adjusted timeline, and after I give myself a short break because doing this thing has obviously worn me out in some way and I need to reevaluate its effect on my life.”

Resolving to do things for yourself or for others should be a continuous thing. Between mid-October and January 1st there is a huge uptick in charitable donations because there is such an emphasis put on it by commercial outlets. You should take care of you and, as best you can, take care of others all the time. Please repeat after me:

“I do not have to wait until next year to do things. There is no law that says that I cannot do these things right now.”

Obviously there may be various reasons why ‘right now’ isn’t an ideal time to start something--perhaps you need to wait until your next paycheck comes so that you have the cash on hand, or until after your kiddo goes back to school so that you have the freedom to be someplace at 9am on Thursdays. These are perfectly practical reasons to wait to do something, and I applaud your forethought. Just don’t let your practical reasons evolve into some sort of hyperbolic practicality monster that lords over you and makes you wait until you have ::Dr. Evil voice:: one million dollars in the bank before you can put your money into things that have meaning to you, or tells you that you can’t possibly do anything extracurricular for yourself until your child is an adult because what if the school calls while you’re doing it?

Save your money, but don’t be afraid to splash out a little on yourself.

Do what you want in the time you’ve got. If the school is going to call, they’re going to call anyway, and there’s no point sitting around waiting for it to happen ‘just in case’. Go do the thing and deal with interruptions as they happen, not before.

I was attempting to find a really good Twitter thread from author Chuck Wendig to quote here, but I actually got nauseated from all the scrolling while searching for it so rather than yak on my phone screen I opted to give up on that angle and switched to the ol’ Googlemachine, which yielded this:

“OKAY SERIOUSLY FOLKS I’M CALLING THIS “MAKE STUFF MONDAY,” AND NOW I’M GOING TO GO MAKE STUFF

YOU GO MAKE STUFF TOO OKAY

DO THE THING

CARVE THE WORDS

DRAW THE PICTURE

SING THE SONG

WRITE THE POEM

MAKE STUFF”

If I remember correctly, this was a portion of the thread I was looking for to begin with. Thank you, Mr. Wendig, for your all-caps encouragement to “DO THE THING”. I now encourage all of you to go forth and “DO THE THING”. Do it now, but not because it’s January. Do it because you want to do it. Or because you need to do it. Make the plan and “DO THE THING”. If you want to do a different thing in July, DO THE DIFFERENT THING IN JULY.

Can you imagine all the things you could do if you just did them instead of waiting until the socially-approved timestamp?

“DO THE THING”!