It is that time of the year again. The Earth—moaning and groaning with the physical and metaphorical burden of all of humanity—has completed another one of its infinite circumambulations around the Sun, and now the New Year is upon us.
If we are lucky, the New Year arrives with the promptness of a mother inspecting a bachelor’s apartment. It appraises and invariably criticises, registers the faint smell of regret, and, if we are fortunate, offers a smattering of praise for the one decent chair and the plant we have inexplicably kept alive.
In response, many of us do what people have always done when confronted with time’s fresh ledger. We promise—optimistically, even if implausibly—that things will be different this time.
New Year’s resolutions are often discussed as a modern neurosis, an invention of gym chains and smartphone reminders. But people have been making them since time immemorial. If the resolutions of literary figures teach us anything, it is that self-improvement has always been aspirational, conditional, and faintly comedic.
Samuel Pepys: The pragmatist
Take Samuel Pepys — the celebrated 17th-century diarist — who entered 1662 armed with a freshly awoken conscience and a plan to stop enjoying himself. On December 31, 1661, he wrote, “I have newly taken a solemn oath about abstaining from plays and wine, which I am resolved to keep according to the letter of the oath which I keep by me…”
This was no casual “cutting back.” This was a man swearing off theatre—theatre!—until Michaelmas. His motivations were a vague desire for virtue and a very specific anxiety about money. Like many modern resolvers, he believed fewer indulgences would lead not only to solvency but to righteousness.
To his credit, Pepys largely kept his oath. When he broke it, he did so methodically. On September 29, 1662, he noted that his vow had expired, granted himself a brief celebratory relapse, and then recommitted. By year’s end, he glowed with satisfaction: “…lived a very orderly life all this year by virtue of the oaths that God put into my heart to take against wine, plays, and other expenses… and which I am now going to renew…”
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Pepys claimed no moral rebirth, only improved administration. Less wine, fewer plays, more contentment. A 17th-century productivity hack that rings true, even today.
Charles Dickens: The Optimist
Not everyone treated January with such austerity. In 1836, Charles Dickens proposed a far more generous policy, which was to assume the year is innocent until proven otherwise. Writing in Bell’s Life in London, he declared: “And we are bound by every rule of justice and equity to give the New Year credit for being a good one, until he proves himself unworthy the confidence we repose in him.”
If the year disappoints you, Dickens implied, that is the year’s fault, not yours. It is a bracingly externalised philosophy, one that modern readers, accustomed to blaming themselves for everything from inflation to burnout, may find oddly refreshing.
Virginia Woolf: The gentle skeptic
Virginia Woolf, by contrast, blamed no one and resolved almost nothing. On January 2, 1931, she sat down to enumerate her intentions and immediately undercut the exercise.
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“Here are my resolutions for the next 3 months; the next lap of the year. To have none. Not to be tied,” she wrote.
Woolf’s list echoes what we now call self-care. She resolves “to be free & kindly with myself,” to avoid being “goaded…to parties,” and to allow herself inconsistency: “Sometimes to read, sometimes not to read.” She even permits strategic antisocial behavior: “To go out yes—but stay at home in spite of being asked.”
Then, inevitably, the work sneaks back in. “To make a good job of The Waves.”
It took Woolf two lines to abandon her resolution not to resolve. Rest, it turns out, is easiest to promise and hardest to schedule.
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James Agate: The selective edgelord
In 1942, critic James Agate attempted to curb his tongue, though not without conditions. “To refrain from saying witty, unkind things, unless they are really witty and irreparably damaging…”
Agate’s resolution contains its own escape hatch, thoughtfully installed. He wished not to be nicer, merely more selective. It is a reminder that resolutions often function less as moral commitments than as negotiations with ourselves.
Timeless resolutions
Taken together, these New Year Resolutions resolutions suggest that January has always inspired a particular blend of ambition and self-knowledge. (Generated using AI)
Alcohol, unsurprisingly, appears everywhere. Pepys returned to the subject repeatedly, noting in January 1662: “Thanks be to God, since my leaving drinking of wine, I do find myself much better and to mind my business better and to spend less money, and less time lost in idle company.”
Replace “wine” with “cocktails” and “idle company” with “group chats,” and the sentiment could headline Dry January today.
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Even waking up earlier was once framed as a moral act. Samuel Johnson reflected: “I have risen every morning since New Year’s day, at about eight… yet it is no slight advancement to obtain for so many hours more, the consciousness of being.”
Others looked outward. William Cowper, writing at the close of a difficult year, resolved not to improve himself so much as to wish improvement upon others. “I resolve to hope that the new year shall obliterate all the disagreeables of the old one… I can wish nothing more warmly than that it may prove a propitious year to you.”
Taken together, these resolutions suggest that January has always inspired a particular blend of ambition and self-knowledge. People promise less than perfection and more than nothing. They fail, adjust, recommit, and write it all down.
Mark Twain, surveying this ritual in 1863, offered his usual dry encouragement: “Next week, you can begin paving hell with them as usual.”
Taken together, these New Year Resolutions resolutions suggest that January has always inspired a particular blend of ambition and self-knowledge. (Generated using AI)
