How To Have Better Habits in 2024

The new year is not real. It’s an artificial, made up event. Nothing has really changed. Nothing has actually happened.

We know this because there are so many different ways of tracking ‘the year.’ There is the fiscal year. There’s the academic year and the agricultural year. There are regular years and leap years. There’s the Chinese year, which varies each year, typically starting somewhere between January 21st and February 20th and lasting until a similar date the following year.

In actuality, every single day is a new year…because one year has elapsed since that day, one year earlier.

But still, there is something to the New Year. Even the Stoics acknowledged it. Seneca started each year by plunging into the frigid Tiber River in Rome — I think he was washing off the old year and starting fresh for a new year, as well as starting by doing something challenging and difficult.

Sure, you could start fresh any day, but would you? Do you know?

So let’s use the close of 2023 and the beginning of 2024 as an opportunity — however forced, however artificial — to reexamine, reorient and restart. That’s what Epictetus said, “First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.” He asked how much longer we were going to wait to demand the best of and from ourselves?