January 1 is the day people make resolutions. They resolve to lose weight, pay off their credit cards, get more exercise, get a better job, make more money, end a bad relationship, or find a new relationship. It’s a New Year. We want to make it better than last year or the year before. Resolutions, we think or hope, will get us started on the right track. Never mind that the resolutions we made last year were soon broken. This year will be different. All we have to do is strengthen our resolve. And so, we make a firm commitment to stick to our resolutions. We announce them to our friends. We declare them in our blogs. We write them down, and post them on the bathroom mirror. We read them every morning and every night. We visualize ourselves sticking to our resolutions, and imagine how wonderful our lives we be a year from now as a result of following through in the commitments we have made to ourselves. Somehow, by making the resolutions, we feel as if we have already accomplished our goal of sticking to them. The resolutions will bind us to the path of making the right choices and avoiding the wrong choices. We see people who make resolutions as having a guiding light that will steer them past the temptations that shipwreck the aimless crowd toward the goals they wish to succeed.
From an existentialist perspective, resolutions cannot work, because existentialism holds that human beings are free to choose in any given moment. In their radical freedom, they cannot be bound by resolutions made in the past. No matter what I resolve today, I am always free to have that extra piece of cake, to make another charge on my credit card, or to sit on the couch instead of going for a walk. In each situation, I am free to do or not to do. I am confronted with a choice and with the anxiety that comes with the freedom I have to make that choice.
In Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre gives the example of a compulsive gambler who resolves to quit gambling. When he encounters the gaming table again, the gambler finds that his resolve vanishes. The resolution he made is of no help to him in making the choice to gamble or not to gamble. His choice is in no way bound by his resolution.
Resolutions are one form of what Sartre called bad faith. Bad faith is denying that I have a freedom to choose. It is saying that I could not have helped doing what I did or not doing what I did in a particular situation. We want to bind ourselves with our resolutions. We want to believe that by making resolutions, we will put ourselves on a predetermined path of progress toward our objective, but we cannot bind ourselves. Nothing can. We are always free. And for most people, that is not good news. Most of us would rather flee from our freedom and not be burdened with the anxiety that accompanies making our own choices.
The good news is that, though we are not bound by our resolutions, we are still always free to choose what is best for us.
Carl Norman
Idaho USA
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