Unsuccessful New Year's Resolutions

We've all had it happen to New Years or Lenten resolutions. Mr Holdsworth discusses why it happens.

I just learned this week that, according to the secular liturgical calendar, this past Monday is known as Blue Monday because it is the most depressing day of the year. This is, apparently, what the world wants us to fixate our attention on. But I can understand why people would connect this week to depression, at least in the Northern Hemisphere. If you live in a place like I do, the days are extremely short and cold, the highs of the Christmas season have worn off, and perhaps, most of all, all that optimism and hope that anticipated a New Year and a new you has proven to be misplaced for a lot of us. We’re now 3 weeks into the new year, and it’s likely, that for many of us, those New Year’s resolutions didn’t work out and so they’ll get shelved until enough time can pass so that our memory fades, and along with it, our cynicism that would discourage us from trying again next year. But if we’re so prone to making resolutions – or if we’re so convinced that we can improve ourselves, then I think it’s worth asking why is this resolve so often met with failure? Well, there are 3 reasons that I can think of for why this happens. They are that we don’t understand ourselves in a logically consistent way, we don’t have the right tools, and we don’t have a vision of the good.