Work out. Be happy. Lose weight. Stop smoking. Unplug.
Popular social networking site Twitter recently listed the top Tweets about resolutions made for 2015. Judging by the list, some things don’t change. People still resolve to work out, lose weight and quit smoking on the 1st of every year.
But there were also new trends. ‘Finding happiness’, for instance, is big, following last year’s viral ‘100 Happy Days’ challenge. In the spirit of New Ageism, ‘Love myself’ makes the top ten. Interestingly, so does ‘unplug’, with users pledging to spend less time online. Though as one Twitter user pointed out, “Saying your resolution is to #unplug on Twitter is like saying you’re going to try to control your drinking problem while at a bar.”
Nevertheless, there are advantages to sharing resolutions on social media. As anyone who has ever made a new year’s resolution knows, good intentions rarely fuel you past the first fortnight of January. According to a study done by ‘Statistic Brain,’ a site specialising in percentages, numbers, financials and rankings, about 45 per cent of all Americans make new year resolutions, but only eight per cent are successful in achieving them.
However, as anyone who has used Facebook or Twitter will tell you, it’s tougher to back out when you have announced your vows online.
Hence the mushrooming of groups, pages, communities and challenges to help with your goals. Which brings us back to the mysterious 100 Happy Days social phenomenon, which began with just a custard-yellow webpage, challenging people to be happy 100 days in a row. One week after its December 2013 launch, it was being shared a 1,000 times a day on Facebook. As more and more people began to post pictures of babies, puppies and birthday cakes with the 100 Happy Days hashtag, the movement grew. Today it’s at 1.6 million likes on Facebook and 19,000 shares on Twitter.
This year’s version is more convoluted, piously warning users that it is not a “happiness competition or a showing off contest.” (Sidebar: But how awesome would a happiness competition be?) You’re cautioned not to “cheat,” before being officiously asked how happy you are on a “scale of 1 to 10.”
If you’re confused about how to fill the happy form, try one of the many other versions that have sprung up this year, including the “100 days of happiness” with a twist. Encouraging people to “practise gratitude daily”, the website also asks ‘how happy are you lately,’ on a scale of one to ten. Along with helpful hints ranging from ‘Depressed’ at 1 to ‘Off the hook’ at 10.
Prefer something more uniquely hipster? Then follow Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s example. He makes an innovative new resolution every year: in 2011 he vowed to eat meat only from animals he killed himself; one year he decided to wear a tie every day; and one year he famously learnt Mandarin.
This year, Zuckerberg crowd- sourced ideas for his ‘personal challenge’ via a Facebook post on December 31. Over the next three days, he got about 143,000 likes, 3,700 shares and 57,000 suggestions. One user suggested he “pay off a person’s student loan everyday,” (adding the hashtag ‘a girl can hope’). An Indian user suggested he learn Hindi. Other ideas ranged from the philosophical ‘Discover the meaning of life’ to ‘Kill candy crush.’ Users also asked him to “Stop Facebook for one year”, or at least “Deactivate it for one day a year, and call it the Purge." Many respondents asked him to plant a tree for every user, to which Zuckerberg replied with a noncommittal “that would be a lot of trees.” Smiley. He finally decided to read a new book every other week. Meh.
More interesting is city fashion photographer Sunder Ramu, who’s announced on Facebook that since he’s been a “shy guy” his entire life, and “hence not very good with the ladies,” he intends to have at least one meal a day with a different girl every day for 365 days. He posts pictures of every date on his page, much to the delight of a growing audience, which is no doubt inundating him with dinner invites.
Also proving that resolutions can be fun are the song and book challenges currently doing the rounds. The 30-Day Song Challenge asks participants to post the ‘First Song on Shuffle’ on day one, then goes on to give instructions for each day. Day 3, for example asks for a song ‘In the Year You Were Born’; by day 23, it’s a song ‘About a Girl’ etc. Similarly, the 30-Day Film Challenge asks users to post one link per day for the appropriate category, beginning with your ‘Favorite Film,’ through Guilty Pleasure, Drama, Comedy, Action, Romance, Sci-fi and so on.
If you would rather read your way through 2015, try Goodreads, which calls itself the “world’s largest site for readers and book recommendations.” They’ve asked users how many books they want to read in 2015. While the average is 40, there are also some oddly specific users, such as the person who had pledged 144, or the wildly ambitious man who decided to read 365 books this year.
Meanwhile Kindred (a co-operative digital publishing group), stating that the current book challenges aren’t challenging enough created their own list. It includes reading a novel from the 1800s, listening to an entire audiobook and finishing a novel in one day.
For weightloss junkies, there’s a smorgasbord of offerings. Facebook alone has ‘Weightloss warriors,’ ‘Yummy mummies’ and the intriguingly niche ‘Tattoos and fitness’ group. (5000 members in all). Like to eat? There’s the ‘Fit Foodie’ group promising “gobble, gobble without the wobble.” Experimenting with raw food? Try ‘30 bananas a day’, a group that calls itself “Fruities following a high-carb, raw vegan lifestyle.”
Meanwhile, on Twitter, author Chetan Bhagat has taken a 100-day fitness challenge with Reebok. He tweets about it saying “Have to post data of progress every 10 days to millions. Scared. All fit people, stay with me!”
If you’ve also decided to squeeze into your skinny jeans this year, join one of the many ‘30-day challenge series’ doing the rounds. ‘The Plank’ is a good place to start. As the website Eat, Drink and Be Skinny puts it, “Because muffin tops are good for breakfast, not your waist line.” Need community? There’s already about 29,000 people doing it on Facebook’s 30-Day Plank Challenge page.
More ambitious? Try ‘2015 miles in 2015,’ in which a group of people have pledged to cover 2015 miles in the year 2015, by running, cycling and/or swimming. In true community style, members are encouraged to post “weekly mileage.”
You don’t need to battle alone through a resolution anymore. This is 2015. Where support comes from strangers all over the world. And no matter what people say about the evils of the Internet: that’s unarguably a wonderful phenomenon.
Stay strong, and have a brilliant year.
