How are your New Year’s Resolutions going so far?

Have you made any? Have you kept them up? Have they already proven too hard?

Every year, I find myself fascinated by the theme, in part because New Year’s Resolutions have risen in popularity at precisely the same time other seasonal commitments have declined. Lenten fasts are out; New Year’s Resolutions are in. Catholic injunctions to fast from meat on Friday are widely derided. But Meatless Mondays? Count me in!

Perhaps the difference is between commandment and choice. (If the priest tells me to eat fish on Friday, that’s oppression; if I choose to become a pescatarian, that’s my own ethical choice.) Or perhaps it’s the difference between an arbitrary injunction and a program of self-improvement. (Giving up alcohol for Lent is puritanical; Dry January is a good idea! And, in fact, it usually is…)

But for whatever reason, while religious practices of “making resolutions” have mostly declined, the secular ones are more popular than ever. And in fact the river of cultural influence now flows in reverse. In 2023, Mark Wahlberg’s participation in the Catholic devotional app Hallow’s Pray40 Challenge led to the greatest news chyron of all time: beneath a still image of Mark Wahlberg in a slim-cut shirt with ashes on his forehead, a banner announced Lent as “Mark Wahlberg’s 40-Day Challenge.” Which… isn’t quite the traditional language for the season, but fair enough.

And yet New Year’s Resolutions seem, at least to me, to be a much harder burden to bear.

Lent lasts forty days; our Resolutions last, supposedly, all year. In Lent, you give up something good, a “guilty pleasure” at worst, in the knowledge that you’ll take it up again at Easter with joy. But New Year’s Resolutions are supposed to stick. Lent brings us closer to our mortality, to the fragility and frailty of life. New Year’s Resolutions, for the most part, are supposed to make us healthier, wealthier, and/or wiser. Lent reminds us that however we’ve succeeded or failed during those forty days, the path always leads to the Resurrection. New Year’s Resolutions lead us in a circle, month by month, as we slowly fall off the wagon and arrive back exactly where we began, in time for the next New Year.

After all: How many New Year’s Resolutions have you ever had that really lasted 365 days? (Or maybe that’s just me.)

I wonder what it would be like to take your New Year’s Resolutions and treat them as if they were a little Lent-ier. To see them, not as a chance to improve yourself—to go to the gym until you’re bored, or to dry out for a month, or to do the crossword puzzle every day—but as a chance to lighten your load, to give up some of the burden you’re carrying, and to draw a little closer to God.

You know that I love words. And I was wondering, this year, where the name of “Resolutions” comes from. Are we trying to solve some problems in our lives—perhaps to re-solve them? Are deciding we’ll be resolute in pursuing our goals? Have things gotten so bad that we need to resort to non-binding legislative acts? (“WHEREAS, I have been slacking off about the gym, and WHEREAS My loved ones gave me new exercise clothes for Christmas… RESOLVED, that I will work out four days a week in 2025.”)

The original sense of a Latin resolutionem, it turns out, is “the process of reducing things into simpler forms.” It took three centuries or so for “resolutions” to come to mean “pious intentions for the new year,” among many other things. But I think I’d like to go back.

So: If you’ve made New Year’s Resolutions this year, is there a way that they can take the pressure off you, rather than piling more and more on? Is there a way to use them to simplify your life, rather than make it harder? Is there a way that—rather than taking on Mark Wahlberg’s 365-Day Challenge—you can try, this year, to “reduce things into simpler forms?”