Why Your New Year’s Resolutions Fail (And Why That’s Not Your Fault)

Self-Improvement Is Lonely. That’s Why Most People Quit.

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“Je est un autre” - I is another , Why We Make Resolutions and Why They Fail

It’s 11:47 PM on December 31st. You’re making promises to a stranger, the person you’ll be tomorrow. Arthur Rimbaud knew this fracture: “Je est un autre”, I is another. But he added something we forget: “Tant pis pour le bois qui se trouve violon”, too bad for the wood that finds itself a violin. Every resolution begins here, in the gap between who you are and who you’re trying to hear beneath the noise.

The resolution list isn’t a mirage. It’s a voice, your actual voice, trying to be heard. When you write “exercise daily” or “write more” or “read instead of scroll,” that’s not aspiration. That’s your authentic self breaking through, speaking what it actually wants before mimetic desire drowns it out again. Before you remember what everyone else is doing, wanting, valuing. The list is the rare moment your real voice gets a word in.

But resolutions fail. Not because they’re unrealistic, but because we are mimetic creatures. We don’t want things because they matter to us, we want what others want. René Girard understood this: we desire according to models. Your friends aren’t waking at 5 AM, so why should you? Everyone’s binging the new series, and you feel left out reading alone. Your colleagues are chasing the same projects, and your writing feels indulgent, selfish, pointless. We sacrifice the important for the urgent, again and again. And the urgent is always what the crowd is doing.

Here’s what we don’t admit: the old habits worked. They weren’t failures, they were strategies. Sleeping in gave you time with friends who stay up late. Not exercising meant you fit in with everyone else who doesn’t. Not writing kept you from claiming to be different, special, threatening. Saying yes to everything made you essential, loved, necessary. These habits had a function: they kept you mimetically aligned. They kept you in the forest with the other trees.

To resolve is to accept exile from that alignment. Sartre knew this, existence is defined not by intention but by action sustained against resistance. The wood must be cut to become a violin. But we rarely say what this costs: the wood was beautiful as wood. It had grain, warmth, wholeness, belonging. The violin serves others, makes music but it can never return to being wood. It must endure the cutting alone.

And this is the lonely chapter no one mentions. The distance between “je” and “l’autre” is not just philosophical, it is lived in solitude. You wake while others sleep. You refuse what others accept. You practice discipline no one sees or celebrates. You lose friends who don’t recognize what you’re doing. The reflection mode is always on: you see what you’ve lost, the beauty of what you left behind, the mimetic safety of the crowd. Most resolutions fail not because the goal is too hard, but because this loneliness is unbearable. We retreat not from effort but from exile.

This is why there’s no magic in New Year’s Eve. The date is arbitrary. Real resolution requires something harder: reflection that lets you see what the list actually mirrors. Each resolution reveals what your current self rejects, not laziness, but the specific discomfort transformation demands. “Exercise daily” might mean: I reject being alone at dawn, being seen struggling, losing the warmth of the bed and the ease of fitting in.

Only when you understand what you’re rejecting, what you’re losing, and why you kept those old habits so long can you decide if exile is worth it. Not just grit, but grounded reasons. Not willpower, but clarity about the trade. The wood had value. The violin will have purpose. Between them is the cut, the loneliness, the reflection on what you’ve left behind.

Camus would call this revolt, refusing the absurd continuity of life as it is. But revolt exhausts. It requires living without mimetic models, accepting that your voice might lead you somewhere no one else is going, with no guarantee anyone will hear the music you make.

Even failed resolutions matter, though. They testify that beneath mimetic desire, beneath the urgent crowd, there’s still a voice trying to be heard. “Je est un autre”, I is another. Not the other you’ll become, but the other you already are beneath the performance. The self that knows what it wants before the models tell it what to want.

Rimbaud understood. At sixteen he wrote “I is another.” By twenty-one he had abandoned poetry, exiled himself to Africa, became unrecognizable to everyone who knew him. He lived the resolution to its extreme, complete exile from the models, from the crowd, from the identity everyone expected. “Tant pis pour le bois”, too bad for the wood.

The resolution returns every January not because we’re weak, but because the voice never stops speaking. The gap persists between what we are and what we hear ourselves wanting to become. And in that gap, in that refusal to stay mimetically aligned, lies something more honest than success: the human attempt to hear one’s own voice loudly enough to risk the loneliness of exile, to accept the cut that turns wood into violin, knowing the violin exists not for itself but to make music for others.

The question is never whether you can change. It’s whether you can hear your own voice clearly enough, understand what you’d lose deeply enough, and believe the music matters urgently enough to accept that tant pis, too bad for who you were. The wood was beautiful. But the violin serves something beyond comfort. And sometimes that’s worth the exile.

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Lets engage

The wood was beautiful. The violin has a purpose.

In the comments, use one sentence to complete this:

“My resolution means exile from…”

(e.g., “…the late-night talks that make me feel included.” or “…the safety of being who everyone expects.”)

Let’s name the cost, together. The first step out of the mimetic forest is acknowledging what you leave behind.

I’ll start: My resolution means exile from the validation loop of social media, from the feeling of being “in the know” on every trend, and from the addictive, mimetic safety of the hype cycle.

My violin is a quieter life of deeper focus and quality. The cut is losing the constant hum of the digital crowd.

Your turn. Name your exile. 👇

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