I think the idea behind new year's resolutions besides trying to take advantage of the psychological momentum and sense of fresh start that comes with turning a new calendar year is to anchor our intentions to something larger than ourselves such as a shared temporal marker that gives our personal changes a timely legitimacy.
If we didn't have a majority agreed upon way to measure the passing of time in standardized increment, we could well be in 2049 and I personally wouldn't be able to tell the difference in a meaningful, psychologically distinct way.
This is actually a thought experiment that I routinely engage in for the non-trivial aspects of it, say the realization that so much of our urgency and deadline-driven behavior is tied to arbitrary social constructs rather than natural rhythms.
Without calendars, we'd likely organize our lives around cyclical patterns, i.e harvests, migrations, personal milestones, but then we'll probably lose the precision that creates both pressure and progress.
Of course, there are lot of blank spots with this perception, for one, we have a biological age that grows, peaks and declines based on our interaction with the physical world.
Secondly, even though time can be perceived as more subjective than objective, it's objective aspects have a dominant force that can't easily be dismissed. The window for certain experiences narrows whether we acknowledge the calendar or not, e.g. childbearing years.
I mean, there are also successive seasons and natural cycles that impose their own structure onto our experience of the world.
Apart from that angle of time being both construct and reality, I think on the internal front too the motivation to pursue those new resolutions dwindles further as newness of the new year's gives way to the reality of the daily grind that respects no calendar milestones.
Any sort of sustainable change will require coming into terms with the boring middle of having to build and run on systems and commitment rather than mere excitement. This is where most resolutions die, the lack of foresight and underestimating how unglamorous real transformation is.
I personally frame this new year's energy as a boost to further progress along the path I'm already on and when the seasonal enthusiasm goes away, the transition back to baseline effort is easy and I need not jack up my internal resolve to keep something that wasn't meant to stay in the first place.
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