Most Overrated and Underrated New Year’s Resolutions

Want to lose weight? Spend more time with a nose in books and less time poking around online? Become a so-called happy person?

Then the only way to accomplish these things is to make a declaration on January 1 to become a better, more fit, healthier, radiant person. Not January 2 or January 3 or April 10 or July 5, but January 1. New Year’s Day! That’s the only way!


OVERRATED


The gym/working out every day/losing weight

This is obviously the No. 1 duh overrated resolution and probably the easiest item for terrible failure. Launching the unexercised body into intense cardio workouts and weight training is just stupid. Plus, you’ll be frustrated by all of the wannabe hardbodies that take freaking forever to knock out a set at the wide-grip lat-pulldown machine. Plus, you’re definitely getting sick because gyms are cesspools of germs, especially in the winter.




Ditching social media

Yeah, sure. You’re totally going to trim the time spent scrolling through Instagram, attending events found on Facebook, replying to messages on Twitter. Soon, you’ll gain an e-reputation. A bad one — jerk, for instance. And then everyone will un-friend you and you won’t have any more friends. Happy New Year.



Become “happier” in the New Year

What does this even mean? We’d be “happy” to hear.



More analog, less digital

Instead of blogs, you’re dead set on reading the newspaper, which will inspire the writing of “old fashioned” letters on a typewriter, all while a new record player spins wax at 33 1/3 and 45 rpm because that’s what a vinylphile does when he’s “getting into vinyl.”

Projectile barf.

Please don’t become this douche-y swine. But if you do, keep quiet about it. After all, if you’re fully committed to overrated resolutions, you won’t have a Facebook account to announce it to the world.




Volunteering

Wait, so you want to help someone out because it’s New Year’s and not out of the bottomless goodness of your perfect, saintly heart?




UNDERRATED


Saving money

No, this is not overrated. Not blowing money on a crap restaurant meal or a bunch of drinks or a device that suffers from instant technological obsolescence is never ever false hype. The absence of a monthly gym bill is a great way to start pocketing extra scratch.



Take trips in your own city

As a native or longtime Houstonian, have you ever been to the San Jacinto Battleground and Monument? Or the National Museum of Funeral History? What about Sam Lightnin’ Hopkins’s Historical Marker in the Third Ward? No? Well, you should. All of that stuff is so easy to get to and it's worth the 50 cents of gas.

Not seeing the sites in your own city is ridiculous. It’s like living in Arizona and never going to the Grand Canyon, which seems to afflict that state’s population much too much.




Stretching

Even if you don’t get hoodwinked into buying a pricey gym contract, you need to stretch. No, this isn’t a subtle way of telling you to become a yogi. (That’s also overrated.) Eight hours of sitting at a desk sucks, but limber muscles rule. Baby got back pain? That’s probably because you have tight hamstrings. Reoccurring headaches? Dude, your neck is basically rope, but you can totally stretch it yourself, even while sitting at your sad cubicle.



Getting in shape/deleting Facebook/becoming a “happy” individual/other miscellaneous mind-body-spirit choices in April or September or some other time that’s not January 1

Why do lifestyle choices have to occur on a specific day? Don’t you want to achieve steadiness in your life? If so, going all in on one day makes you a .00273973 (1 divided by 365) balanced person.


Don’t make any New Year’s resolutions

Pull this off and you’re the coolest.