Why I don’t like New Year’s Resolutions
“Eleventrees Road at Dusk”, Kewsick, England, May 2019
Hello Friend,
Yes, I know it’s June, and no one thinks about New Year’s resolutions at this time of year. But I do, because I don’t like them.
I was going to write about this in December or January, but that would have been cliché. The obvious questions to ask are: Who made a New Year’s resolution or two? And when did you stop thinking about them?
I understand the reasoning behind them. At the turning of the year and the dark of the winter – in the Northern hemisphere at least – it seems like a good time to reflect on the past and consider what changes can be made for the coming year. When I was in high school, I spent two Christmases in New Zealand. It was very odd to think about a white Christmas and the dark of the year in the middle of the summer. We were out hiking and playing at the beach. That was the first time I questioned the idea of resolutions only at the New Year.
In July 2009 I was laid off from my job during the Great Recession. It was the middle of the year, and I had a big, life changing event. What if my resolution was to get a promotion that year? That didn’t work out very well. Even though I am out of work in July, should I wait until January 2010 to start my resolution to find a new job?
What about the health issues people like to address for their resolutions? If we have our annual exam in the middle of the year, and the doctor tells us our cholesterol is too high, or weight has gone up too much, or some other marker is outside the norm, do they write us a prescription for January to get healthier? No. Usually they want us to start making changes right away.
“Lovers Lane Trail” Olympic National Park, WA, November 2017
I know these are more dramatic changes that can happen any time. And New Year’s resolutions are more about taking the time to project into the next year. But why should that be the only time to do this?
Some of the most common resolutions are: Get healthier, save more, spend more time with friends & family, start/complete a creative project. What usually happens over the next few weeks and months? Gym memberships go up, we might put a few extra dollars in the bank, we might call/visit family a bit more, we make a list of the steps to get that project going. Then the rest of life gets in the way. Or the more typical ways our lives run for the other 10-11 months take back over.
If we don’t really have a personal commitment to the resolution, we’re not going to make the necessary changes to make it a part of our lives. Because I think many people create resolutions that they think they are supposed to do, or what they see everyone else talk about (see the list above). And why don’t we spend the time thinking about the specific things that matter to us, and the way to make them happen throughout the year?
Let’s take “I want to get healthier”. There are so many facets to something like this, it’s easy to default to “I’ll get a gym membership” or “I’ll start eating better foods”. But so many people, like me, don’t really like the gym, and can be intimidated by it. I’ve had a gym membership for more than 10 years, but, because I love swimming, 95% of the time I go, I’m only there to use the pool. Strangely enough for a guy, I actually like step aerobics. But you will never, ever see me in a gym class doing it. (It would not be a pretty site.) So, my wife and I spent years building up a home gym. We would not wait until Christmas or New Year’s to get something we wanted for the gym. When we see something we think could be beneficial, like the heavier weights my wife uses, we save up, and then buy it when we can – whatever time of year.
“Buoys and Flag” Provincetown, MA July 2017
On the creative front, winter isn’t always the best time to be outwardly creative. It’s more of a time to be contemplative and think about the things we have done or might want to do. We might spend some of the winter months thinking about the changes we want to make. Then, we tell ourselves we will start making the change soon – like maybe this weekend or next week when things get quieter.
But somehow weeks or months go by before we think again about making those changes. Then we feel bad we haven’t been working on it, and then decide it wasn’t that great, so we put it aside and keep on keeping on. It’s hard to change the course of our lives, because we’ve built up habits over years that make up our days and define who we are. This is not an easy barrier to break through or overcome. We get intimidated by the overall, big picture change we want to make. It looks hard to move our lives in a whole new direction. And it is. So, why even try to make any change?
Maybe there is a little fear involved with this. A part of us sees the changes we want to make as a threat to the identity we’ve built up. If we are adding something new that we see as a benefit, or we are taking away something that might not be the best for us, it’s still a change. This change will make us a little different then how we saw ourselves before, and we might also worry how the people around us will accept or reject this change.
As the year goes by, we think about another set of resolutions. We get a little motivated, and then something comes up to throw us off track. So, we start thinking we are failures, and the changes we wanted to make just aren’t worth the effort. We beat ourselves up, and crawl off to the corner to wait for next year’s resolutions to start us on this lovey treadmill again.
“Fall in the Rain Forest” Olympic National Park, WA, November 2017
So, can you see a little more why I don’t like these darn things? We often put a lot of pressure on ourselves around New Year’s to come up with these annual resolutions, and we miss or down play all the great things we do start or end throughout the year. We run across a new idea from something we read or hear, and we want to explore it. We learn a new technique and we want to play with it. A new opportunity opens up at work, and we want to go after it. We decided there is a habit that is not helping us, and we decide to make some changes to minimize it. It may or may not have anything to do with something we thought about in January, but that doesn’t matter, we’re going to work on it and make the changes now.
This whole scenario is a little like what happened to me when I bought my first DSLR for Christmas in 2016. I told myself that winter I would start using it to justify buying it. But, I only pulled it out for a couple of camping trips and two family vacations in 2017. As 2018 came around, I told myself again I would spend more time with the camera. Ah, nope, that didn’t happen. either. When 2019 started, I was really questioning my decision to have spent the money on a camera I wasn’t using much at all. The annual treadmill was wearing me down.
In May of that year, my wife and I went to England to pick up our daughter who was studying in London. Like the few other trips in the past couple of years, I did take the camera with me. Oh, I had so much fun with it. And it was soon after coming back, I decided to put more effort into my photography. Remember, this is May, and I wasn’t going to wait until January again to resolve to make the change. I decided then to start carrying my camera to work every day.
Thank you and keep creating what you do.
Patrick Krohn
June 2026
“Fire Leaf” Table Rock State Park, SC, September 2017
A similar situation happened around writing this blog. I first came up with the idea in the fall of 2022. As New Year’s 2023 rolled around, I told myself I would start writing. Well, that didn’t happen, nor did it happen in 2024 or even January 2025. It wasn’t until the fall of 2025, when Matt Payne invited me on to his podcast, that I realized if I wanted to say I was writing a blog, I better start writing a blog. I had created my own deadline to push myself to get moving. And I use these weekly deadlines to allow – force – myself to keep practicing my writing.
Oh, it’s so easy to let our current lives stay as they are. Even when we see others putting together their annual resolutions, we think we need to jump on board. Then, just like almost everyone else, we let those fall by the side, and wonder later in the year what ever happened to them, and to the person who made the resolution. What I’m finding out with my life is January just isn’t the time of year for me to resolve to make things happen. The timing just isn’t right that often. Heck, it’s only one of 12 months. Why should it carry all that pressure for the rest of the year?
I hope we can all resolve that when opportunities come about, or changes happen in our lives, we take the time to reflect then, not at some arbitrary date someone else made up. We may want to add something, or we may want to take something away, or both, and we take this present moment to see what it is and we start making those changes – no matter how small – right now.