Illana Weizman: “Nothing changes at midnight on December 31st”

You have plenty too forage of your contacts filling your screens with reports from the past year and resolutions and goals for the year ahead? The friend who puts on four Reels of her wedding, the little cousin who imports her TikTok videos paying out, at the rate of a frame per second, her travels and her outings in the biggest European clubs, the acquaintances who list their successes professionals in an annual Instagram grimage in… LinkedIn?

“The distorting mirror of the networks presses where it hurts”

Attention, I am not (quite) throwing stones, I fully understand the need to look back and be satisfied with what has been achieved, we deserve it, it is also what opens up a more hopeful vision of the future. What bothers me is the accumulation on the networks and the effects on the mental health of individuals. We are not emotionally prepared to receive endlessly looping successes from hundreds of people we follow and are more or less close to, even total strangers. The distorting mirror of the networks presses where it hurts. We are not equals when it comes to “successes” as we don’t start with the same tools and privileges, and Instagram and co. erase these inequalities and create a lump of envy and low self-esteem.

For many of us, no explosive or spectacular success, no mountain move, dream job or lucrative salary. Often, year after year, our main accomplishment is somehow managing to keep our sanity afloat and surviving a series of hardships. And it’s already big contrary to what Instagram retrospectives of each other might suggest.

“Don’t count on a reconfiguration of your brain at the stroke of midnight or any fundamental change”

As for resolutions, fund and shirt with year-end balance sheets, a time in which one no longer looks back, but forwards (anything in order not to be in the present moment), I confess that I can even less frame them. If it can be motivating to give yourself broad lines and goals to aim for next year, let’s face it, the fact that the Earth has completed its revolution around the Sun does not change our abilities and our material realities. . Don’t count on a reconfiguration of your brain on the stroke of midnight or any fundamental change. According to a study by the University of Scranton, 77% of people made commitments for one week, but only 19% for two years. According to another study by Professor Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire, Only 12% of us keep our New Year’s resolutions. Based on these numbers, I see making a list of good intentions as a way to add guilt to a very likely failure.

Bringing change into our lives by adopting better habits is a daily mechanic, not a fictitious leap we make between December 31st and January 1st. And when I talk about everyday mechanics, it is a prerequisite to have the material means, which is not the case for everyone.

For my part, I wish you a (as) happy new year (as much as possible), without resolution or self-flagellation, glazed with beauty and touches of happiness, with force or the possibility of letting through the dark.