January is the month of collective delusion.
350,000 people bookmarked Dan Koe's writeup on how to fix your entire life in 1 day. Bookmarked it. To read later. The irony.
We set resolutions not because we've done the work to understand what we actually want, but because the calendar changed and everyone else is doing it. It's a status game dressed up as self-improvement. You post your goals, get the dopamine hit from announcing them, then return to the same patterns by February because nothing underneath actually shifted.
The problem isn't discipline. It's that you're trying to bolt new behaviors onto an identity that doesn't want them. You say you want to lose weight, but part of you is terrified of what happens after. You'll have to maintain it forever. People will expect things. The safety of being someone who "struggles with their weight" disappears.
All behavior is goal-oriented, even the self-sabotaging kind. When you procrastinate on the thing you said you wanted, you're not failing to act. You're succeeding at a different goal: protecting yourself from judgment, maintaining predictability, avoiding the discomfort of becoming someone new.
Real change doesn't come from motivation. It comes from disgust. From a moment where you see your current trajectory clearly enough that tolerating it becomes unbearable. That's the dissonance that precedes transformation. Not inspiration, but fed-up-ness.
The question might not be "what do I want to achieve this year?" It might be: "if nothing changes for the next five years, what does an average Tuesday look like?" Sit with that. Feel it. Let it become real enough that staying the same stops being the default option.
Then maybe January becomes useful. Not because the calendar is magic, but because you finally stopped lying to yourself about what you're actually willing to change.