New Year’s resolutions don’t change anything until we change ourselves

By David McElroy · January 1, 2014

I don’t make New Year’s resolutions. I’m sure they’re useful for some people, but they don’t make any difference to me. I think I’ve finally figured out why.

Resolutions seem to focus on a desired outcome or behavior rather than the reason behind the behavior. Just wanting to change your outcomes isn’t enough. You have to change your decisions that have produced the outcomes you’re trying to eliminate.

I find it really easy to list the obvious things I’d like to change about myself. I’d like to drop the weight that I’ve gained in the last five years. I’d like to move to a home I like better and is more suited to me. I’d like to make more money and do work that’s fulfilling. I’d like to keep my house cleaner. I’d like to have a romantic relationship that I’m happy with and is emotionally healthy. I’d like to find the motivation to complete the film projects I’ve been working on.

This isn’t rocket science. I can make a nice list of them. I can even promise that I’m going to do them all. But that doesn’t work for me. That approach also doesn’t seem to work for others. Why not?

I think it’s because we fail to look at the reasons we do the things we do.

It doesn’t do me a bit of good to swear I’m going to use willpower to force myself to quit eating sweets and exercise more unless I look at why I’ve made the behavioral decisions that led me to gain weight. It doesn’t do me any good to resolve to make more money unless I ask myself why I’ve done the things I’ve done in the last decade that have led me to squander my talent and opportunities. And so forth.

I’m where I am in life because of the decisions I’ve made. Just like a lot of people, I was saddled with some really poor childhood programming that I didn’t understand for many years, but I can’t blame that forever. As an adult, I have to take responsibility for changing the things in myself that have led to places I sometimes don’t want to be. But in too many cases, I’ve been willing to complain about the results I’ve been getting without changing the decisions that create the outcomes.

I started changing some of my decisions a few months ago. Some of those decisions would seem trivial to others, but they’re big deals to me. (Anyone who’s known me well would be shocked to see me take a job that requires me to go to an office and work for others, for instance, even though this is typical for most people.)

I would love to say that every decision has led to immediate results, but that’s not the case. Change takes longer than I’d like it to take. But I can either make decisions and count on gradual change or I can keep wishing and hoping for magical change because I put something on a list and “resolved” to do it. I know which one seems like the approach that might bring results.

I’ve been doing some things lately that I didn’t want to do. For instance, I’ve done some work that I didn’t really enjoy, but it’s the first step in pushing myself in new directions to make myself more financially stable and prosperous. I’ve changed the way I handle some relationships in my life. I’m more willing to make painful decisions to exclude people from my life who want an unequal relationship that I’m not willing to be part of.

These might not seem like big deals to you. The other decisions I’ve made might not sound like big deals to you, either. It might sound more interesting to make a list and promise to “make more money” and “have a good romantic relationship.” But I believe that making the more mundane decisions will do far more to produce positive outlines than any list of resolutions will.

If I’m still in the same place next year that I am today, it will be because I haven’t continued to make decisions every day that make me a better person, not because I didn’t make a list of grand outcomes that I promise to somehow fulfill.

I don’t think I’ve ever met a person who successfully uses resolutions each year, but maybe those people exist. For me, though, it’s not about the list of outcomes. It’s about making decisions each day that make me the man I should have made myself years ago.

Will that lead me to where I want to be? I can’t say for sure. Ask me in a year. Ask the people in my life in five years. If my outcomes are what I want them to be by then, it will be because of some terribly mundane decisions I’m making today. I have faith that it will be worth it.

At this point, I have to sell myself — the changes I’m making — to other people and see who wants to be a part of my future and has faith in me. That can be much more exciting than making resolutions each year.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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