> I have a different perspective. Overall, I admire people who try to make change in their lives for the better.
This is good general advice. Why not just be supportive and nice to people instead of dismissing whatever effort they put in things that they want to do or are passionate about.
This makes it easier for yourself to change too, whenever that is desirable or needed.
There is nothing wrong with a new years resolution but you have to take it for what it is. Actually getting fitter, eating better and losing weight is a multiple year commitment at least. If it is hard for any extended period of time the likelihood of success is low.
Another line of thinking that goes into things like New Years' resolutions is the idea that significant change can only be intentionally and effectively made in a long series of tiny steps. The OP discusses the dual of this idea but misses the main thing:
> The reality is that if you are going to do something that's really difficult, like changing your whole approach to eating, you are likely to either fail, or to accumulate the kind of micro-failures over time that erode your motivation, death by a thousand cuts.
The flip side here is that overall progress is composed of micro-successes over time that build your motivation.
I've kinda got a hypothesis on this... see in the cold of winter, going to the gym is a great idea. But as spring comes around, you want to be outside - maybe even hiking, biking, etc, IE: being physically active. Then the kids are home all summer and you get distracted with family activities. Then the kids go back to school but you are out of routine going to the gym and it takes a while to get back into the pattern.
My point is, I think we all jump to this idea that the person who stops going to the gym is being lazy, whereas I think a lot of it has to do with patterns of behavior and "externalities."
So don't use statistics as an excuse to be a dick.
For my money I'm going to expose the person to a better strategy rather than supporting and reinforcing a clearly bad one.
stares awkwardly at the Bottle of Ozempic in the corner
It’s more a confession to the mindset of these people who fixate on the pessimistic side of a pitched battle.
For an individual, the attempt to improve yourself is usually admirable.
But I am cynical about New Year's resolutions, and I think my priors are something like "the decision to make a change on New Years is more likely to fail than the same decision made at any other arbitrary point in time because 'everyone knows' that New Year's resolutions fail".
If someone had a problem that involved making life changes to fix or make progress on it, amongst the worst possible prescriptions for fixing this problem would be "make a resolution".
Most people don’t start, some do but don’t stick with it, a minority make it to that point where they see what I was saying and make it a habit long term habit.
Thankfully I don’t have any known disruption events on the horizon. But for little things, like when I have to fly at 6am I get up at 3/3:30 to get a quick (and intense) mile in around the neighborhood. And I workout in hotel rooms, etc.
There were so many days I didn’t want to but just pressed play and figured I’d get 10 minutes in. But I knew it I just decided to do the whole workout.
Eventually moved off of P90x and mixed in a variety of predefined and made up workout to keep it interesting. But now I don’t feel on my game if I didn’t get a chance to workout in the morning, so it’s become a pretty strong habit.