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It is New Year's Eve, and I normally count myself among those who make some resolutions for the upcoming year. They're usually mild and forgotten by February. I'm old enough now to know that there's no realistic way I'm going to, say, cut out sugar from my diet entirely or train for a marathon. Maybe I eat a little more healthfully in January, but that usually doesn't last. (There's a reason why you're going to see a big spike in advertisements for gyms, fitness trackers, and skincare products between now and Valentine's Day - all those people making resolutions.)
I am who I am, and one small joy of being in one's late thirties is having a firmer sense of what I am - and am not - capable of doing, how I can and cannot change.
But this year, I'm off the resolutions train entirely. As Sarah Lazarus wrote on Twitter:
Source: @sarahclazarus on Twitter
At the end of 2019, 42% of Americans said they intended to make a New Year's resolution, according to Marist's polling. In fact, through most of the 2000s and 2010s, the percent of Americans saying they planned to make a resolution hovered around that figure. Resolutions were slightly less popular in the late 1990s.
While Marist doesn't seem to have asked their resolutions question this year, The Economist/YouGov poll did. And while the wording is slightly different, the poll also shows a much, much lower percent of Americans who say they plan to make a New Year's Resolution - less than one in four. (In that poll, the under-30 somethings are by far the most likely to make resolutions, suggested they have not yet learned the lessons that us defeated thirty-somethings have!)
Source: The Economist/YouGov poll
2020 was not a great year for most people. The onset of a global pandemic and the accompanying economic crash and human toll was massive. There was hope that 2021 would be the year things would turn around - in fact, according to Ipsos, 82 percent of Americans expected that 2021 would be better for them than 2020 was.
But 2021 was not the great year most Americans were hoping for. Ipsos' polling this year shows 80% of Americans felt "2021 was a bad year for my country". Fully half (50%) said this year was "a bad year for my family." In the end, only 34% actually thought 2021 was an improvement over 2020 according to my Echelon Insights polling.
Optimism about next year is also diminished compared to last year. Heading into 2021, we had vaccines on the horizon and shots starting to go into arms. This year, according to the Ipsos polling, only about half (54%) think next year will be better economically. Ipsos and Echelon ask in different ways, but in the Ipsos poll, while more believe that 2022 will be better for them personally (71%), but that is a sizable drop from the percent feeling the same way at the end of 2020. Echelon's registered voter sample, meanwhile, is also about twelve points less optimistic about 2022 than it was about 2021.
After last year's optimism - lesson learned.
So for 2022, if you're not feeling in the mood to set a bunch of lofty goals and ambitious targets...don't sweat it. This year was a lot. You're not alone. And if happiness is just reality minus expectations, the lower expectations we seem to have for 2022 just might be setting us up for an unexpectedly great year after all.
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Thanks again for being a reader of Codebook. Did you decide to go ahead with a resolution for 2022? Hop to the comments to start the discussion.
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(Cover Photo Credit: Irina Veklich/Getty Images)
