What’s your New Year’s resolution?
If you’re an avid social media user, you’ve probably been accosted with them for months.
Twitter in December (and Instagram in January) is a minefield. For some, it’s a pleasant, congratulatory experience. A chance to share pride, prove worth, and receive a cyber pat on the back.
But for others, it’s simply a means of sharing self-aggrandising humble brags about what they had achieved from 2010 to 2019 – and what you, by extension, hadn’t.
It was a fairly grim place to be for anybody who was feeling slightly daunted by the prospect of the New Year. The sense that you hadn’t really done much with your life was rife for many people, some of whom made the very wise decision to stay away from social media entirely until all of the excitement had worn off.
But amidst all of the quote tweets and bullet pointed lists of achievements, and the intense crippling guilt that you just hadn’t done enough, there remained one simple – yet incredibly difficult to comprehend – question.
Why do we care so much about what other people are doing?
Two days ago, I decided that I wasn’t making any resolutions. I was avoiding the fad diets, the sudden drop in calories, the expectation that my entire life was going to be different, suddenly, simply because a new decade had begun.
Sure, I wasn’t going to eat an entire 400g of Wensleydale like I had been most nights of the festive period anymore, but that’s not a resolution. That’s just basic self-care.
I’m already pretty good with money. I’m a decent enough person. I go to the gym most days, emerging from spin classes severely dehydrated, sore, (and smug) like the rest of us.
New Year, New Me doesn’t really seem applicable – or possible. But New Year, Slightly Better Me That’s Going To Try To Stop Caring What Other People Think, At Least Somewhat? Yeah, that seems doable.
Safe in the knowledge that each and everyone of us could probably afford to be a little bit more of a decent human being from time to time, I decided that that’s what my Big Change Of 2020 was going to be.
And although being a good person absolutely involves treating other human beings with the respect, patience and empathy they deserve, it also involves treating yourself that way too.
It was a feat that I had seemingly forgotten how to do efficiently over the course of a few rough months – and one that could potentially be remedied by going a little easier on myself.
And, in short, giving less of a shit.
Late last year, I read a book of a similar nature so aptly called The Life Changing Magic of Not Giving a F*ck.
Written by Sarah Knight, the book teaches us to limit the amount of fucks that we can give to ensure that we are not overloading on things, events, and people that we care about. Or rather, that we don’t care about.
Stressed about an upcoming work event? Don’t go, if you don’t want to. Worried that your boss is dissecting every word you’ve included in your pre-holiday handover document? Why do you care? Would rather suck a lemon than attend your boyfriend’s sister’s best friend’s gender reveal party? Then suck away.
The book, much like my New Year’s resolution, is more about prioritising happiness and what is best for yourself, rather than wasting time and energy on things that don’t really matter.
A simple change, one might posit, if only giving less of a shit about people’s perceptions wasn’t so high up on the comprehensive list of things that most of us seem to judge worthy of worrying about.
Giving the bare minimum of a shit will never be a possibility for me. This I know.
There could be a million new decades, reams of self-help advice, and a thousand people screaming that I don’t need to care about whether it’s rude if I don’t comment on Karen’s first thirst trap of the year, but I still will.
And I’ll probably still comment on it too.
The aforementioned is a very specific example that isn’t all-encompassing of the pointless events in life I currently give a shit about, but it’s one of many.
And it’s one less (among those concerning other people’s accomplishments and whether that second emoji at the end of that message was A Bit Much) that I can at least try to stop giving this year.
