With January coming to an end, it’s that time of year again where my New Year’s resolutions start looking more like fantasies than goals. Each year it’s the same story: I enter January with every intention of hitting the gym and eating healthier, but by the third week or so when the 75 Hard challenge turns out to be, well, harder than expected, I find myself scrapping the list altogether.
I don’t know if I’m alone in this quitter mentality, but why do we do this to ourselves? Obviously, a new year offers a new slate, and people are bound to set new goals, but how did the concept of the begrudged “New Year’s Resolution” begin?
According to History.com, we owe our obsession with new-year betterment to the Babylonians, who were the first to hold known celebrations for the new year. In mid-March when crops were planted, the Babylonians affirmed their loyalty to a new or reigning king with a 12-day festival known as Atiku. During Atiku, citizens made promises to the gods that they would pay their debts and return borrowed objects. They believed by fulfilling or failing on these promises, they would fall in or out of the gods’ favor for the coming year.
Similarly, the ancient Romans made new year promises after Julius Caesar reestablished the calendar year. Pronouncing January 1st the start of the new year, Caesar and the Romans believed the month’s namesake, the god Janus, symbolically looked into the past year and ahead to the future. Because of this, at the start of each January, the Romans made sacrifices to Janus and promised good behavior for the new year.
The holiday’s religious roots also have ties to Christianity, with early Christians welcoming the new year by reflecting on past mistakes and vowing to do better in the future.
Though our current version of New Years is more celebratory than religious, these ancient promises are likely what our tradition of resolutions originated from. Luckily for me, however, our failed resolutions don’t bring about any smiting from the gods. In fact, about 43% of people nowadays don’t follow through on their resolutions, probably because they are the only ones holding themselves to these promises.
So, maybe my issue lies in my own willpower, and if I was making promises to an external force like those before me, New Year’s Resolutions would not be so easy for me to give up on. Still, it is comforting to know that some hundreds of years ago, a girl in Babylon was probably failing her resolution just like me.