“I have two resolutions. To stop being so brutally honest, and to stop being such a compulsive liar.”

That’s been my default answer every time someone asks me what my resolution is, to start my adventure into the new year. It’s always a joke answer, because truthfully I never care about resolutions. They should never be something to convince yourself of, but to just go and do regardless of the time of the year.

So resolutions should never be taken seriously.

But it’s the thought that counts isn’t it? For most, the idea of the resolution is to look back at the year you just had, and think about how you can do it differently for the future.

2013 had too much vitriol. It’s probably the same as it’s always been, but the start of this blog in September was over the fact that I paid too much attention to the internet hate machine, and decided to do my part in doing something about it.

There’s just too much of that going around it seems. If I had to say something, I’d want to suggest we all have an open mind from this day forward. Part of the reason why we have problems, as a society, is that we just give them to ourselves. We’d wake up in the morning, thinking how today is a perfectly fine day, and there is something wrong about that. We can’t stand the thought of being happy for longer than a minute, so we seek out something to get mad over.

We have become accustomed to spouting drama over social media, to things that have no right being our problem. There are those that face issues on their own, but because we witness these things happen over the internet (due to our need to make our personal lives public) we generate a mob mentality to help others feel worse about themselves, even when we have no real reason to be angry about it.

My friend Robert makes an excellent point whenever we’ve brought these things up. Nobody is ever mad about anything, we just get caught up in it. Antagonizing opinions are easy to get stuck in, because it takes very little effort to be miserable about something.

In my short stint of doing this, I’ve learned that I have very little right to say anything, being that I am a white male. I understand that my description puts me in the category of worst type of person throughout history, and I can’t speak for women, those of a different skin, or anyone LGBT. Knowing all that, I also can’t speak for the other white men out there, or whatever any ancestors were up to… I can only speak for myself.

So when I don’t have the right to be sympathetic toward other people, the least I can do is treat those the same, regardless of who they are.

On the subject of resolutions, or ‘promises to ourselves we will never keep’ it would be fun to try something different. If you get caught up in a situation where you want to be angry then stop, drop, and listen. Don’t pick a side, don’t ignite your pitchfork, just take it in. Don’t be so quick to reblog or retweet just because a word that you like is used. Overall, fight the urge to form an opinion.

If you can’t help it, then do your best to look at a situation at every angle. We only comment on things when we look at the surface, because the internet moves so quickly in our eyes.

Yet, do you ever notice how it really doesn’t? If you give yourself time to really think over the stuff that you want to comment on, it’s still going to be there the next day, to years from now.

Personally, I’m going to take myself up on a challenge, and I’m going to do many more things with idealoclast just to have a change of pace. Maybe I’ll want to involve more people, maybe 2014 will let actions have the chance to speak louder than words.

In any case, take the beginning of this year (and then every day after that) to explore your options. If you find yourself happy, don’t look for a reason to be miserable.