New Year’s Resolutions are self-made fools’ gold
Too much chaos and variance will most likely lead to not achieving yearly goals
Whether they're realistic or not, January is the time of year where people set goals to achieve in the following months. (Austin Kelly)
As the world heads into 2024, many people set up goals to achieve for the new year once again.
It’s that time of the year where people create their New Year’s resolutions to accomplish throughout the next 12 months. However, most people setting up their resolutions are likely to give up or fail to reach them, even with the extra day 2024 has given the leap year.
If anyone knows about setting up resolutions and coming up short, it’s me. My main goal for 2023 was included in a previous article from The Runner about New Year’s resolutions, where I wrote I wanted to create and post more engaging video content.
I was surprisingly on a decent pace to achieve this goal throughout January but don’t fully know what happened afterwards.
I think plenty of New Year’s Resolutions end up being dropped or unachieved because a lot can happen within a year. At least partially, in my opinion. Even if there’s over 300 days to make progress on achieving those yearly goals, most of that time could end up being prioritized for other activities.
Looking back on my main resolution last year, some of my time in February and March ended up being occupied with preparing to compete at an Esports event in the spring. It also didn’t help that I lost about three weeks of time from previous commitments at the end of 2022. So, I ended up having to cram more time than I would’ve liked throughout February and March for preparation.
I then had another esports event I planned to compete at in May and spent even more time preparing for it since I had even more to catch up on.
Something I am surprised about is how often I attended events last year. Whether it was covering one for a story or just because I wanted to be there, more time than I expected went into traveling and engaging in those events.
I went to a journalism conference in April, some conventions and festivals throughout the year, and the esports competitions. I’ve even committed time to setting up plenty of events myself, some that were open to the public and some within my mutual spaces.
I was also job hunting for the first half of 2023, and after I got a new job by the summer, I ended up doing a lot of hours during the second half of the year.
I didn’t even mention the usual class work I had to keep up with throughout the semesters. While I did take only three classes for all three semesters, for the first time I ended up travelling to a campus I don’t usually study at for one of the classes. With most of the classes being upper-level courses, the workload also felt heavier to go through myself.
As the cherry on top of another chaotic year, the one special video content collaboration I was hoping would pan out didn’t end up happening since both myself and the other content creator ended up being too busy throughout 2023.
However, if there’s any silver lining, I still made progress on content creation online. I started doing streams on Twitch, either for my own channel or someone else’s. I even reached 100 followers on my X, formerly known as Twitter, account, which is crazy since I didn’t care about the platform until last year.
I still plan to do some activities online this year, but to do them when the energy and motivation comes up and not because of a goal I set up for myself.
