Host (The Dream Podcast) (2:20)
Happy New Year. Sadly, this is the first opportunity I've had to kick off an episode with a story about Mark Twain back in the 1860s, Mark was still named Samuel Clemens and his brother Orion, solid name, no need to change it, if you ask me. Was appointed some political position by Abe Lincoln out in Nevada and took Sam with him to act as his secretary when he was bored. Sam would write letters to the local paper about whatever and he signed them. Josh. Eventually the folks at the paper kind of got to like him and they offered him a job and he took it. And he started going by the name Mark Twain as Mark Twain. On January 1, 1863, he wrote this. Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual. Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink, and swore his last oath. Today we are a pious and exemplary community. Thirty days from now, we shall have cast our reformation to the winds and gone to cutting our ancient shortcomings considerably shorter than ever. We shall also reflect pleasantly upon how we did the same old thing last year about this time. What a marvelous grump, that Sam, Josh, Mark guy. His letter got upstaged that day by a national New Year's resolution, the Emancipation Proclamation. I've always thought of the tradition of resolutions as kind of a hallmark holiday, a made up thing that spurs the sale of gym memberships and mutual fund investments. But it turns out they're ancient. The first evidence we have of this being an annual practice comes from about 4,000 years ago. I emphasize evidence because humans have been doing this stuff forever. They just didn't have Facebook to memorialize everything or like clay tablets or whatever. Around 2000 BC we know that Babylonians celebrated a new year during the spring equinox, which was the time for planting crops, mostly barley. And as part of that celebration, they made little symbolic gestures, like promising to pay off their debts or be nicer. The funnest part, in my opinion, of this holiday was when they made the king take off all of his regalia, crown and scepter. I don't know what he wore, and confess his transgressions. And then he would get slapped publicly in the face by a priest. Later, when Julius Caesar created the calendar we use, he decided the year would begin in January, named after the God Janus, who had two faces, one facing forward and one backward. So you get the symbolism, reflection and projection. In practical terms, January 1st was just the day that all the new government officials took office. During the medieval era, a silk merchant from Florence called Gregorio Dati kept a diary that we found. And it's really pretty, actually, nice drawings and stuff. And in 14 oh, 4. He wrote a list of resolutions for himself for the New Year, most of them rooted in his shame around not keeping the Sabbath holy. And this one about sexual. I resolve from this very day and in perpetuity to keep Friday as a day of total chastity. With Friday, I include the following night when I must abstain from the enjoyment of all carnal pleasures. So no getting fresh on Friday or Saturday night. You seem cool, Greg. The trend toward restraint and moral correction continued and grew in secular circles, eventually landing us here with a tradition of saying, what did I mean to do last year that I promised, promise, promise, promise to actually do this year? I'm Andy Rooney. I mean, I'm Jane Marie, and this is the dream. What follows is a compendium of the New Year's resolution. According to Pew Research, half of adults in the US aged 18 to 29 make New Year's resolutions. As we age, the idea kind of loses steam with only 20% of people over 50 making them. We see the same thing in Europe. The almost 50 year old me wants to say this is because of wisdom, but it's not. Early in life we just have a lot more churn, a lot more opportunities for like, goal setting, think about romantic relationships and deciding where we want to live and for the kidless, whether they want kids or not, and just all that free time to put toward doing stuff or thinking about doing stuff. It's a period of rapid change. So resolutions make a lot of sense as things to like, put on a vision board or whatever. Plus there's a thing called optimism bias that's more prevalent in youth, you know, before the world has done its worst. And it's what helps us decide to join pyramid schemes, for example, or buy a fixer upper or date a loser with potential. That bias fades over time once you have to live through a bunch of shit you didn't see coming. But a lot of us continue to make resolutions until we're dead. Sadly, around 80% of the projects we commit to on January 1st have to do with weight loss. Sometimes they're couched as like, I want to get healthy, but it's just weight loss.
