SATISFACTION: Resolutions

There’s a saying that always trendy every crossover season;

“New year, new me”

The simple way to explain this is “as I’m starting this new year, I’m bringing with me a new attitude” and most times it’s always for the better.

It actually became a tradition for me to always make new resolutions every year even though I don’t get to follow suit all of the time.

As each year comes to an end, there’s a particular feeling I get about counting my accomplishments over the year.

It is a very popular feeling since some other people even include it in their social media updates about how they’ve lived their lives in the year coming to an end.

I don’t think there’s any other reason for this than to make amends for the previous year's mistakes and choose better ways to live so that the coming year would be better.
In my own case, I write down what I thought I should have achieved and mark all I’ve ticked out of my bucket list.

But if I could still find where I wrote my new year resolutions, I’d just tick out the already accomplished goals and look out for a better approach to get the rest off the list.

However, some people think reminiscing about past ways and making amends or portraying a fresh attitude in resonance with the beginning of the year is just a waste of time since people tend not to follow it.

It got to a point that some people even turn it into a joke which eventually became trendy every crossover that;

“There’s no new year, new me”

“I remain the same yesterday, today and forever”.

Some even included that there’s no point in changing attitude and settled for the “fact” that anything bound to happen, will happen.

Source: unsplash.com

When the year 2021 was coming to an end, I thought about all I wanted and didn’t get so I decided to write a list of all the things I wished that I had and arranged them in the order of their importance.

When I was done, I thought about everything all over again and I realized that everything I wanted could be purchased.

Every single thing on my list involved “buying this for myself, owning that, buying that for my parents, celebrating this and giving that out”. Everything boiled down to money.

So I made up my mind that money was the answer to grant all of my yearlong wishes.
I thought that since I wrote them, all I needed to bring them into realization was hard work.

I wanted to work hard so that I could make a lot of money and tick off everything in my bucket list.

During the crossover night, I solemnly reminisced over how I actually lived throughout the year passing away. I thought that if I’d saved some money throughout the year, then I wouldn’t be bothered about not accomplishing you enough.

So, I wrote a different attitude that I’d possess in the new year and I added my bucket lists to it.

Few months into 2022, things weren’t going as planned and little by little, I started going against my own will as written in my new year resolutions. But I stood my ground with money being the center of my attention because I believed it was the only answer to all my cravings.

I made money the greatest satisfaction, I thought that with money, I could get anything I ever wanted in the world.
Of course there’s a saying that “money doesn’t bring happiness”.

Now, how does one get satisfied if one isn’t happy?

When I was already over halfway into the year and I’ve not even achieved a single thing in my written list, I felt so bad about myself and I even cried, blaming myself that I wasn’t doing enough.

I thought within myself again that If one actually thinks about how unfair life is, then one would never ever derive satisfaction from it.

I so much love to relate occurrences and happenings with my mindset.

It was around that period that I realized that there’s more to life than seeing money as the only destination.

I reset my mind before the end of 2022. I wrote a new list of what I’d love to achieve in no particular order. They included self awareness, self improvement and gaining more knowledge.

It wasn’t that I wasn’t working hard and growing but I was too fixated on making money the end point of my hard work and satisfaction to actually appreciate myself and see the changes.

I came to the conclusion that self awareness and appreciating one’s effort and growth are sure ways for more inspiration about how to move forward.

Deriving happiness in life even when it isn’t fair, continuous learning, counting my blessings, loving other people, being recklessly kind, celebrating every win no matter how little it may seem, taking one step at a time, improving myself everyday as well as being realistic are the other ways I now derive satisfaction in.

However, I asked other people about what they think of satisfaction by relating it to my previous mindset.

I posted the question below on my WhatsApp status and I got a few responses from it.