No More Resolutions

Most people use New Year's resolutions as a way to procrastinate. Instead of starting the change today, for whatever value of today it is, we put it off to start on this break point we call the new year. Really, what we are doing is procrastinating. Any change worth making is worth making now. If you are not willing to change today you really don't want to change, and the results will be what you expect in that case.

Then I read this Buddhist perspective on resolutions, which questions why change at all? The American economy sort of runs on the idea that we are all broken and need to fix ourselves by changing, usually starting with buying something. Facebook runs on the same principal. Your life sucks compared to the lives your friends are sharing on Facebook, so here are some ads for stuff you can buy to make yourself feel better. Maybe trying to fix ourselves every year is the wrong approach, because we aren't really broken.

I certainly have been guilty of making plans around the new year to change. I was even moderately successful at it. However, if trying to lose that last 10 pounds is making you miserable maybe you should just accept yourself as is and stop trying to rearrange your life around losing 10 pounds in 2019. 10 pounds one way or the other really isn't going to make a difference in actual health for most of us anyway.

Note - I'm working in the realm of "wants" here. If you need to lose 50 pounds to improve your odds of living 5 more years that is a different issue, and one covered by the first paragraph about procrastination anyway.

I had been thinking about what to change for next year, and after reading the blog post above, I'm not making any resolutions. More of the same works for me. I have an amazing wife and a fantastic marriage, great kids, and I'm in good health. I'm going to be thankful for all that, and focus on being fully present in the life I've already got, because it's pretty damn good as is.

This is entry #30 in my attempt at 31 days of blogging for December 2018. I've haven't posted here daily since about 2007, so this should be interesting.