Welcome back! It’s a new year and I thought it’d be nice to start out with a Word of the Day that we all have just revisited and gotten to know a little better: resolution.
Alright, break it down for me. Re. Solution. Every year, we like to come up with these New Year’s resolutions (even though there’s no point to doing it just every New Year’s) and it just so happens that very little of us actually follow through with these resolutions. I realized that if we didn’t keep promising ourselves the same empty promises that we’ve been doing for our entire lives, these resolutions would be called solutions because we wouldn’t be repeating the same thing over and over again.
Oh, yes. So why do we even come up with these resolutions?
There seems to be this trend. Like I already said, we start the year with a resolution, we don’t ever meet the resolution, and then we just remake the resolution. But there’s some reason behind why we even make these resolutions. As if we’re unsatisfied with our lives. I’m not saying that we’re depressed kids walking the earth and trying to find something to fill our lives with joy, because empty promises are definitely not going to do that. Yet, we still want to make sure that we can reach for something.
As humans, we have this tendency to set goals for ourselves. Whether this be winning a Rhodes Scholarship or skydiving out of an airplane, we just want to look forward to something. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that! Our New Year’s resolutions should really just be renamed New Year’s Goals, because the decision-making isn’t exactly set yet. When you break down the word, like I just did, it makes sense that a resolution is a re-solution. However, my version of English syntax apparently isn’t very compatible with Google’s.
“a firm decision to do or not to do something.”
As stated before, I like to go to Google for these definitions because it’s the site that almost everyone who has access to the Internet uses. Therefore, this may be the definition that most people follow when thinking of the word. I don’t plan out to pull out the law dictionary on this site.
Taking into consideration what Google has said, this “firm decision” means that you would stand up and say, “Yes, I am determined to do this.” But when people make New Year’s resolutions, they’re also doing it as part of a fad. They may say they’re firmly going to do something, but that doesn’t actually mean they’re going to do it. Like a lot of people, they’re just saying things to either make you stop asking them questions or trying to be just like everyone else. Either way, there’s no crime in doing that.
There’s no crime in making resolutions, but we keep telling ourselves that we’re going to do something that we know we’re not going to do. It just makes us feel worse about ourselves and weakens these “firm decisions” every time we make them. By the end, our diets begin to consist of the cookies that we can’t resist as we lay on our couches thinking about how many New Year’s resolutions it took us to get to this spot.
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