Hello 2020!

It’s January! January the 1st, 2020! A brand new year and a brand new decade. Time for change and new year’s resolutions and all sorts of sudden changes in lifestyles that we can’t realistically keep up! In fact, you might be trying to decide right now what your new year’s resolutions will be, what changes you will make in the future, how you will try and make your life better this year compared to last year. Actually, if you’re anything like the late Douglas Adams, you might even be looking for a piece of paper to write your new year’s resolution on, only to find the piece of paper you wrote your 2019 resolutions down on.

It happens.

Anyway, we’re all looking forward to a new year, hoping that it’ll be better than last year. For some people, 2019 was shit, for some people it was probably alright. But 2020 is a whole new decade so we should try and make the most of it. After all, we’re all getting older, right? Got to make the most of things.

But what new year’s resolutions should we do? Is there even any point in having or attempting to do a new year’s resolution? You want my honest opinion? No. There’s no point in having a new year’s resolution. If you’re anything like me (we’re all human beings, we’ve got that in common at least), you don’t always tend to… keep your new year’s resolutions. Or you forget what they are. Or you get a few weeks into January and give up. There’s probably a huge spike in gym memberships and diet programs in January that trail off come February. If you’re like me, a new year’s resolution rarely lasts very long. We have complicated lives and setting yourself a hard task in a way to force yourself to change is never going to end well.

In fact, there’s only really one resolution that I’ve actually kept, and that’s my 500 words a day. I started doing this in January 2016 and now I’m starting year 4 of writing.

That though proves something. My 500 words a day was a change, a promise I WANTED to make. It’s not that difficult a task (well, these days it isn’t, it was very hard at the start) but it was something I could do and wanted to do without being too huge a challenge.

My point is, a lot of new year’s resolutions are either too vague or too large for a person to do without stressing themselves out. I mean, think about it, if your new year’s resolution is to eat healthier and do more exercise, that’s a very vague goal, compared to saying you want to go to the gym every day. But going to the gym every day might be too big a goal for someone to do, e specially if it means completely shaking up your current lifestyle.

You need to pick a resolution that you can do without flipping your life upside down and uprooting everything around you, but isn’t so nebulous that you can simply ignore it. At the end of the day, a new year’s resolution is an attempt to change yourself for the better, but you need to have reasonable ideas first.

As for me and my new year’s resolutions? I don’t really have any, aside from continuing to do my 500 words a day. But there are things I would like to do this year, like lose a bit of weight and maybe go on holiday.

Anyway, here’s to 2020! May it be a great year! Or at least better than 2019!