BY: JASON RAYNER

We are now just a little more than a week into 2019. Which is just enough time into the year for any short term resolutions to have been broken.

Does that sound cynical? It’s meant to. Because, I hate New Year resolutions. Or at least, I hate what they’ve become.

I do like the symbolism of resolutions. In all honesty, I kind love the idea of using it as a way to divide the chapters of my life. I also have a birthday at the end of the year and it makes it almost impossible to not think of my age and the calendar year as being tied together as segments of my life. In fact, I even like the symbolism of looking back and noting a few things that you would like to change.

It used to be that resolutions were attainable changes that you wanted to make to your life. Things like reading more, spending less money, quitting smoking. Now they aren’t even called resolutions. The language has changed to sound more evolved and important. They’re coded as “manifestations” or “year paths”.

Which is fine. Call it what you want. It’s the content that I take issue with. No longer are these small changes made to better yourself. Instead they’ve transformed into a list of grandstanding hopes and dreams, disguised as achievable goals. Now resolutions are things like “by the end of the year, I will have a development deal with Netflix”, or “I am going to publish my book and get it on the bestsellers list”, or “I will run a successful business by the end of 2019”. This isn’t to say that any of these things can’t happen - in fact, I genuinely hope they happen for a lot of good people. I also love ambition, and these are good career goals to work toward. However, to expect major changes to take place in a 365-day time period isn’t only unrealistic but, also unfair pressure to place on one person’s psyche. Especially when a lot of the time, these are things that aren’t entirely up to you.

It’s hard enough to keep simple resolutions. Usually all it takes is a cold Saturday for a bottle of red wine to be opened up and break a dry January. Gym memberships can be bought but the harder thing is actually making time to go to the gym. Staying positive works until you log on to Twitter and have your own buffet of things to make you feel blinded by rage and frustration.

So why we do this to ourselves? Because I don’t know about you dear reader, but all this does is leave me feeling disappointed; unsatisfied that I have not done enough.

At the risk of sounding my age, I do blame social media for a lot of this. In the last few weeks I have been inundated with memes and Instagram posts written with the “Notes” app about all of the things people plan to achieve and how they plan on achieving them. I’ve been told to take a dream and put a date to it so it becomes a goal. I’ve been told to look in to a mirror and say what I want out loud. I’ve been told that a lot of people absolutely cannot stop, and will not under any circumstances, stop.

And I’m saying fuck it.

I am sick and tired of “grind” culture. I am sick of hearing people talking about hustling. I’m genuinely horrified when I hear stories of people writing over their Christmas holidays, or working from home while battling a terrible flu, or when I catch myself feeling guilty for needing a vacation.

I’m sure making grand resolutions can be beneficial for some people. I’m not one of them.

Going back, I can see that it has never worked for me. In fact, I’m starting to realize it’s actually been detrimental to my mental health. This is what is responsible for leaving me in a cold sweat in the middle of the night, obsessing over my age and what I feel like I should have already accomplished (even as I type this I’m tempted to google “what are the expectations for the average 33 year old Canadian?”). It’s what leads me to compare myself to others and what successes they have had. I never even bother to take into account other factors such as privilege, access, luck, and the work they have done to get to where they are. Mostly because I’m too obsessed with seeing how I measure up. In fact, that becomes such an obsession that I don’t actually get anything else done.

Because in the midst of panic, I create more and more goals to list to anyone who will listen. You’d be surprised by how much time time talking about my ambitions to anyone who will listen actually takes. I may feel a high talking to people about the several projects I have in the works but, in the end they don’t end up going farther than that because I’m too busy telling myself to hustle and plan the next milestone in my life that I need to hit.

I’m starting to realize that maybe life isn’t like a season of Stranger Things with a neat and tidy serialized arc. If anything it’s more like a season The Good Wife, where development gets interrupted constantly by zany and unpredictable cases of the week.

I’m aware that my anti-resolution sentiment can be seen as a resolution. Perhaps it is. I just know that I am giving up on the idea that a new year will change everything. Good and bad things happen regardless or the time of the year. Motivation is a constant, and I’m tired of being trapped in an inferiority complex. I wish it was as easy as cutting ties with social media (as if I’m giving up Instagram and miss out on daily photos of Gus Kenworthy and Antoni Porowski), and I’ll probably still organize my life based on periods of time, usually by year. I just want to reject any pressure that is put on me to constantly be working and do more.

So yes, 2019 is a new year and I do have a new attitude. It’s coincidental, I swear!