Against New Year's Resolutions

I don’t do New Year’s resolutions. I am not sure which culture does that paradigm come from, but it does not matter.  People certainly do not need to wait for a year to be over in order to resolve in themselves that they will lose weight or exercise more.  Usually, New Year’s resolutions are quite superficial, taken directly from the morning television, ridiculously filled with clichés and as a result, meaninglessness. 

In the midst of partying, flowing champagne and confetti (do people throw confetti anymore, or am I thinking of 1940s films way too much?), everyone seems quite happy.  All that “positive” energy wants to burst out with grand creativity and passion.  But then we wake up in the morning, and it is yet another day we must face.  The old year’s dissatisfactions somehow have crept into the new year, and we wonder how?  We are frustrated perhaps, which takes us back into the old habits.  For those who have even a little bit of existential awareness: we know that we want to break away from these old habits so badly; we know they are “corrupting” our soul, and yet, and yet…  We tell ourselves that it is much too difficult to move from bad habits to good habits, and so, we settle comfortably with what is familiar to us. 

Is there another way to welcome in a New Year?

I realize that it is difficult to remain optimistic today.  I try not to be guilty of limitations of nostalgia for the “old times” (especially if the “old times” in question is an era so far removed from me that I have not even experienced it) but I do falter, from time to time. 

We are facing a world, which is overcome with a fetishistic fixation of relativism.  This fixation has gone beyond the appropriate term “absurd” and has become a “comfortable indulgence” of the Western civilization. 

We are facing the world, where philosophy is dead, and is replaced by pseudo-scientific inquiry, which reduces us to “human machines.”  Asking questions that Plato asked?  Why bother?  They are too old-fashioned and we have obviously moved beyond that naïve questioning.  Man does not care whether he finds meaning in anything, and as a result, we have become sloppy and any possibility of raising standards or experiencing excellence in human endeavor seems so far away.

What bothers me the most is our lack of encounter.  Encounter with a friend, encounter with God, encounter with a stranger, encounter with a child, encounter with a good novel.  Encounter allows for a possibility of being, a possibility of unfolding of one’s mission and purpose in this world.  The meaning is to be found in our encounter with the Other.  We must make an effort to recognize one another’s suffering and to have true compassion (suffering with). 

Is there another way to welcome the new year?

Again, I try not to be guilty of being foolishly attached to the waves of nostalgia.  I don’t want to be stuck in existential time warp.  I am sure that Augustine was experiencing similar disillusionments.  But there is another way to welcome in a new year.  With hope, I think.  If we’re going to love anything, we ought to “love reality.”  We ought to face reality.  We should not fall into the pit of sentimentality, and yet, we should above all, avoid cynicism.  The first creates formless hearts and the latter creates hardened hearts. 

Perhaps, we should welcome the new year with complete awareness of our own finitude, and at the same time, knowing that even though, we are finite beings, we still have the capacity to move towards the infinite.  This, I think, makes dealing with those “bad habits” more manageable for those of us, who are perpetually distracted (like the writer of this essay!). 

Update: As I was further reflecting on the New Year, what it might bring to us, in all its realities, I happen to be reading this book Jean-Luc Marion, and it struck me as the very definition of what is hope and why we should hope.  Here, I share it with you.  Marion is an extraordinary mind--a brilliant philosopher, phenomenologist, theologian--he truly brings together the essence of humanity in this short paragraph.  It is from his book called "The Erotic Phenomenon" (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 222.


"When God loves (and indeed he never ceases to love), he simply loves infinitely better than we do. He loves to perfection, without a fault, without an error, from beginning to end. He loves first and last. He loves like no one else. In the end, I not only discover that another was loving me before I loved, and thus that this other already played the lover before me, but above all I discover that this first lover, from the very beginning, is named God. God's highest transcendence, the only one that does not dishonor him, belongs not to power, not to wisdom, nor even to infinity, but to love. For love alone is enough to put all infinity, all wisdom, and all power to work. God precedes and transcends us, but first and above all in the fact that he loves us infinitely better than we love, and than we love him. God surpasses us as the best lover."