“2026 is the year. It’s MY year. All the other ones? Forget about it. I’ll finally grow a six pack, stop eating lethal doses of Cheetos, read ‘The Iliad’ in a matter of milliseconds, and relish in the fruits of my obviously foreseeable future labor.”
– Every American, Dec. 31, 2025, 11:58 p.m.
…
It’s a promise many foolishly make every time the ball drops – to be better than we were last year. Blinded by the shiny veneer of a new number on the calendar, we put down the Big Mac, pick up the dumbbell and promptly struggle to curl 15 pounds.
It’s Jan. 23 as of the publication of this article, but most New Year’s resolutions don’t even make it to June. A Forbes Health/OnePoll survey found that resolutions tend to only last two to four months. For a yearly tradition so engrained in American culture that’s meant to last the whole year, it’s a shockingly quick turnaround. In fact, Quitter’s Day, the cheeky unofficial holiday rebuking New Year’s resolutions, was on Jan. 9 this year, a mere eight days after New Year’s Day. The unabashed pride in resignation would almost be impressive if it weren’t so depressing.
How did we find ourselves in this situation? Ever since the first caveman ran too slow to catch dinner, humans have been striving to improve themselves. The modern Western incarnation of celebrating New Year’s began to manifest in the 19th century, with special religious services and an influx of German immigrants fueling the tradition of celebrating the beginning of a new year. But the annual tradition has been traced back as far as 2000 B.C. in Babylon, with people promising to return borrowed objects and pay off owed debts. Personally, I’ll be keeping my neighbor’s dog this 2026.
And it’s no wonder that they’ve stuck around in recent decades.
Businesses and corporations can make a killing on New Year’s, with the health and wellness industry particularly benefiting. Gym memberships can spike as high as 30% in January, and the sale of diet products spikes by 20-40% in the same time. There’s a reason Planet Fitness sponsors the ball drop every year without fail. New Year’s resolutions are fundamentally built off of insecurities – inklings that we aren’t as good as we ought to be. And the wellness industry will happily feed off of those insecurities, perhaps by incessantly filling your feed with ads for Apple Watches or whatnot. This isn’t to say that working out or meditating is a conspiracy propagated by Big Gym, but to say that fitness companies aren’t taking advantage of our worst perceptions about ourselves would be simply absurd.
It’s always good to want to improve yourself. But don’t let marketing campaigns be the thing that drives that improvement.
But wait… how DO you improve yourself?
New Year’s resolutions are, of course, all about improvement. But in a weird, roundabout way, they can end up stunting our own growth by framing improvement as a function of a particular season; “I don’t like that I spend so much time on my phone… I swear I’ll stop in 2026,” one hopeless soul surely uttered in October. Ditching the new year as the only time for improvement helps you open up the possibility to be better year-round and can prevent (to an extent) procrastination.
It’s also important to keep in mind that you need to set resolutions you can actually follow through on. That’s where my favorite topic from eighth grade S.E.L. rears its head: SMART goals. It’s an acronym describing how to make productive goals – they should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-based. For example, if my goal was to improve neighborly relations, I could say “Every day at roughly 6 p.m. for a half-hour, I will develop a comprehensive plan to return my neighbor’s dog. This will culminate on Feb. 13, where I shall return my neighbor’s dog.”
It’s always a great time to improve yourself, regardless of where the Earth is in relation to the sun. But keep in mind that your aspirations and goals should remain yours, not beholden to a marketing team or ad campaign – which is why Poodles is mine for eternity.
