I have officially flipped my calendar to the month of January and with that flip into the new year, new resolutions for the year are here.
We collectively agree that the new year is the time to get ourselves and our surroundings aligned, to be better than the year before. I understand the sentiment of a fresh new beginning, the entire year in front of you to accomplish your goals. It’s a healthy way of improving and refining yourself to move forward in life.
Yet do we really need the idea of a “new year, new me” shoved down our throats again?
We’ve all learned that the internet moves fast. If you miss a joke from Twitter one day, it’s hard to keep up with the next five.
That’s why as a generation I believe that we have created the ability to move more quickly to and from ideas while retaining them better than ever before. The date on the calendar has virtually no meaning to society online, letting us ignore the constraints of time in our realities that had a greater impact on generations before.
The need for the annual “new year new me” resolution has passed. We move too fast as a generation to sit down and overhaul our life choices to decide what to do for the next year. We do better at constantly and consistently striving towards little goals throughout the year, which can then amount to a large collective goal at the end of the year. Basically the same way we work on the internet.
Imagine that your yearly goals are the same as Instagram posts. Most people don’t sit down and plan their entire Instagram feed to each exact post. Instead people have a general idea for the theme of their feed. That way whatever does happen throughout the year, they can determine how to deal with certain posts in terms of what the general idea is. That’s the same way your goals should work, one step at a time.
The idea and understanding of taking things day by day is coming back into the forefront of people’s minds again; we understand that you can never predict anything and it’s better to continue striving towards goals with context in mind, rather than promising yourself the same thing over and over. It’s silly to keep trying at the idea of a better and greater year when life does not adhere to the date on the calendar. You cannot change in an instant just because you decided to on a random day in the universe. It takes incremental choices to create changes in your life.
Whether or not you choose to take part in the beginning of a new year as a new and changed you, continue to make goals in life and strive towards them – regardless of the time of day, month or year. Don’t worry, your feed will look great at the end anyways.