BrianGarst.com

Andrew Newman at American Spectator is worried by people who don’t make New Year’s resolutions.

People who don’t make New Year’s resolutions worry me. Are they perfect? Are they simply waiting for the great up escalator to descend from the sky? Are they biding their time until Barack Hussein Obama delivers us from this red-blue valley of tears and into that promised and purple land of prosperity and plenty? Or are they simply lazy?

His questions fly very wide of the mark. He fails to grasp the key point that many people do not make New Year’s resolutions because they make resolutions every day. Those of us who practice continual self improvement do not think we are perfect. Far from it, in fact. Rather, we are simply more serious about self correction than your typical News Year’s resolution practitioner, who is using a training-wheels approach to self improvement.

If I determine there is something in my life worth doing better, it behooves me to start doing it better immediately, rather than waiting for some special day to declare my intentions to fix identified problems. In fact, those who would put off such corrections are typically just using the idea of New Year’s Day as a time for resolutions as an excuse to continue their behavior, guilt free, until Jan. 1st rolls around again. The problem with this approach is that it erodes the will to improve altogether, resulting in your average resolution lasting about a month.

So, Mr. Newman, you need not worry about me. I suggest you worry about your fellow New Year’s resolvers, as their resolutions may be evidence of a personality incapable of correcting bad behavior, even when they know they should.