Here you go again, again… Another year down, another set of meaningful, yet overzealous resolutions you plan to live by… If you are fat, you will probably attempt to honor a gym membership. If you are a smoker, you will try to patch up your bad habit. If you are an alcoholic and/or party goer, you will try to refrain from drinking for a predetermined period of time. No matter your commitment(s) for your New Year’s Resolution(s), you will probably fail at your goal(s). In fact, many of you have already failed and we aren’t even one full month into the New Year. Here is why:
A resolution is a commitment to resolve a problem or flaw you, or someone else, has targeted in your life that has changed your former self. This assumes, just like everyone who makes resolutions, that your former self was some symbolic manifestation of the perfect you, which we all know is false. Deep down in your psyche, however, you feel the younger you is the better you because, with hindsight being 20/20, the past for the most part, was awesome. We all know this isn’t true either. Fundamentally, fat people want to lose weight because at some point in their life they weren’t fat and it is their claim on their resolution to “get back the body once had.” In fact, their body may have not been great at all, but skinner than they are now. The same can be said for smokers and drinkers too. At some point you didn’t smoke or drink, so you are trying to quit or limit consumption in order to transform into your former self. My question to everyone is why? Why do we base all of our New Year’s Commitments on vices we want to resolve, to get us back to our former state? Shouldn’t we all be striving for progression, transforming ourselves into the best person we can be? To do this, we must refrain from declaring a resolution and embrace evolution.
When something evolves, it changes permanently to adapt to its environment in the most efficient and positive way for survival. A New Year’s Evolution is a permanent change. It is not a word or an action of resolving an issue to resort back to a former state, rather an abandonment of self-traits which have hindered the progression of the flawed-self. If you are fat and want a great body, going to the gym twice a week, drinking a Neslie Quick chocolate milk on a treadmill at a pace of one step per minute while dabbing your self-inflicting damp towel by means of the water fountain on your face every five seconds, is not going to cut it. Your resolution is going to the gym more. Your goal is a great body. The evolutionary step to achieving a great body is attacking your fat self from all angles: gym every day, eating right, running in the mornings, running at night, and living fit. When you abandon all self-traits that hinder your quest for a great body, and you embrace what you need to do to obtain a great body in terms of eating right and exercise, you will have evolved. Going to the gym three times a week is easy to give up or abandon. Evolving, changing all facets of your life to accomplish a goal of being a better, more efficient version of yourself is hard to abandon once the better version of you is obtained. Sound trumpets!
This theory of forced evolution can be applied any time and with any type of vice in your life. A resolution is singular and static, meaning one step is taken to fix a vice. Evolution is plural and dynamic, meaning that once an idea of an end state is derived, all mechanisms in achieving that state should be exhausted until that state is reached. Once reached, maintaining the better version of you is as simple as living as you are now, since how you got there has changed your daily routines to achieve your better state. If you accept that when you were fat, you woke up in the morning and ate Nutella covered bananas with a side of bacon, thus causing you to gain weight, then you should accept that you now have a great body because you wake up and run 1.5 miles and eat oatmeal and egg whites. When you make a resolution, you feel like you are giving up on the Nutella covered bananas with bacon, but when you evolve, you feel like you need to run the 1.5 miles and eat healthy to stay adapted and alive, maintaining your better self.
There is no time than the present to start your evolution into a superior you. Whether it is your love life, your family life, your career, your ambitions, or your physical appearance, the only way permanent change will occur is through evolution. Life only happens once (LO HO), so you might as well try to go through it with the best version of you which is physically and mentally possible. The best version of you hasn’t happened yet, and if you believe it has enjoy the reoccurring theme in your life of unhappiness, regret, negativity and resolutions. It is time to evolve, not resolve.