New Year’s Resolutions are a strange cultural phenomenon. They simply exist to be a disappointment. Very few people even complete the goals they set for themselves, and yet this tradition persists. For multiple reasons, including the lack of people that complete their goals (let alone attempt them) and the disappointment that comes from the precedent we set for ourselves, I believe that New Year’s Resolutions should no longer be a tradition.

The disappointment that arises from New Year’s Resolutions is immeasurable. The expectation that people set for themselves around the New Year is usually quite large. They expect big things to happen in the next year; they expect everything, even if it doesn’t pertain to their goals, to be better than the previous year. However, when none of that happens, and World War III trends online on the third day, people get very pessimistic as their expectations were not met.

Once this attitude of pessimism sets in, people quickly and swiftly give up on their goals, never to be completed. When people give up on their goals, their self-esteem is lowered, and they are likely to believe that they will never complete one of their goals at all. But, there is another reason they didn’t accomplish their goals. Everybody’s goals are far too broad. Nobody sets goals that they actually want to accomplish, but they just set expectations for what they want to happen no matter their lifestyle. This leads, once again, to being disappointed in themselves as people tend to miss out on the fact that their goals are too broad for a plan to be made with activities that can be done to reach their goals.

Another person can argue that goals put people into a hard-working attitude based in trying to complete their goals, but this argument fails to consider the overall mentality of people making New Year’s Resolutions. The people that make New Year’s Resolutions usually have a self-esteem problem, at least with the one specific issue they’re trying to improve, already. It has been proven that people with low self-esteem tend to be less driven in accomplishing their work. So what does it matter if they have a hard-working mentality if they have no drive to actually do anything?

New Year’s Resolutions are redundant. They had and still have their purpose, but most of the time their simply a bridge to pessimism. New Year’s Resolutions are a plague on what it means to have goals, because well-made goals are supposed to be specific and achievable, but New Year’s Resolutions are almost always way too broad and thus unreachable.