I've seen a lot of people talk about how 2020 was the worst year they've had. I think a lot of them are damned liars, but it really doesn't make a lot of sense to rank such long periods of time based on the events that took place within them. It's valid, in my opinion, to name a best or worst day. Any period of time longer than that is kind of pushing it. With long periods of time, there's always good things and bad things happening, whether you remember them or not.
It's not just that, the real problem stems from the artificial significance of the new year. Sure, the earth is at roughly the same point in its orbit as it was 365 days ago. Sure, we have to write something we aren't used to for the date, but there is no real reason why the new year is such a significant event. A day is very significant for us, because we sleep in between them. That's a non-artificial separator between days.
New year's resolutions are really what I find annoying coming from this artificial significance. I mention the ranking of years only because I see it being thrown around so much at this specific new year.
A new year's resolution is a fundamentally flawed concept. It is a goal that you set at the beginning of a year, one you wish to complete by the end of the year. A year is too long of a time period to achieve a goal. This is why very few people accomplish new year's resolutions. This is why people buy gym memberships at the beginning of the year, and never go to the gym. When you set such a long period of time for a goal like that, you are setting yourself up for infinite procrastination, and inevitable failure.
The new year's resolutions that I see people actually complete are largely things that were going to happen anyway, or were already in motion. People retroactively make these things resolutions and complete them, fulfilling the cycle of ridiculousness, and feeling good about themselves.
If you want to set a goal for yourself, don't buy into this stupidity. Write down what you want to do on a piece of paper, and give it a reasonable time period. Two weeks, one month. A short time period, so you get off your ass and do what you said you would. If you are trying to do something that will take a much longer time than that, try to break it up into smaller segments. Use affirmative language too. Don't say "I want to lose 50 pounds by next year," say "I will lose 5 pounds in the next month" and do the same thing the month after that. Writing something down gives it much more significance in your head, and I'll bet you end up completing your goal if you did that.
Notice how, months ago, I wrote in a blog post that "there will be an RSS feed for the blog soon™" and how there is no RSS feed yet. It isn't even in the works. I wrote it down, and now I can at least hold myself accountable, but I didn't give it a reasonable time period and it didn't get done.
Rant over. This is definitely one of my longer blog posts. I made an account on Session, add me at the ID below if you want to talk about how ridiculous new year's is, or anything else within reason.
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P.S. The Playdate console has a stupid name, a stupid gimmick and a website that insults your intelligence. The website, though. The website makes me irrationally angry. I have spent nearly two hours of my life poking around and getting more and more pissed off about it. I don't even want to link it, don't want to put people through that torture, but [Botnet warning] here it is. Brace yourself if you must take a look.