My totally normal New Year’s resolutions for 2025
If you’re reading this, congratulations, you’ve made it to 2025. But are you just surviving, or are you thriving? According to the suspiciously, persistent self-help ads that appear every time I open my computer, New Year’s resolutions are a great way to reflect on our mistakes in the past year and work towards achieving our goals.
Never fear! If you’re having trouble thinking of new and ambitious goals for 2025, I’ll share some of mine as a perfect example of reasonable, sane, and universally applicable goal setting.
- Focus on my mental health: don’t make any goals this year.
I’m going to be real with you guys: last year, I might have set some unrealistic standards for my goals. Was planning to simultaneously learn French, Spanish, Japanese, and Italian excessive? I can admit in hindsight that it was. Luckily, with no goals at all this year, I’ll be able to relax, de-stress, and focus on my mental health…
Oops. I guess I already messed this one up. Moving on.
- Give up on school and watch every single television show ever created.
If I’m going to relax, I might as well do it to the extreme! Over the break, I discovered that my non-UofT friends had much more time for these neat, little inventions called hobbies, joy, and pop culture.
When I, like any good researcher, inquired further into this phenomenon, I discovered that in my self-imposed study hole, I’d missed pretty much every single pop-culture event of the last three years.
The solution is obvious: create a meticulously planned, 20-hour day-to-day schedule that allows me to watch every single television show in existence.
Will this suck all the joy out of watching television? Is dropping out of school, ghosting everyone I ever knew, and giving up showering an absolutely wild thing to do? The answer is, of course, no.
- Stop giving in to the voice that comes from the weird, creepy doll in my attic
Look, I think we’ve all been there. We’re doing a bit of spring cleaning in the attic, when all of a sudden, we come across an antique, porcelain doll with eyes that seem to follow us wherever we go with a perpetually grumpy expression. We put it in our room because, hey, we kind of like that gothic vibe. And the doll smiles now, which is cool!
But then the whispers start, and Edith (well, at least mine told me she’s named Edith) is all like, “free me from this earthly prison so I can once again feel the fires of my home in the depths below.”
Which is fair! But… It’s like, every night. And sleep is important. So you try to move Edith back into the attic, but she complains so much of having to “suffer at the whims of foolish mortals” that you just feel guilty and end up putting her back.
But your life is important too. It’s time to take charge, and stop letting our probably-possessed dolls run the show.