The most interesting thing about resolutions is not that we make them, but the various ways we find to break them. We have entered the month where New Year's resolutions are laid to rest. My resolve is usually no match for this bleak stretch of midwinter. I suspect it is only matter of time until I resign myself to frozen inactivity. I will come to see the strange paradox of making promises to myself: I am not the same man I was at New Years, the man who promised to jog regardless of snowstorms or to forego my daily beer regardless of the craving. Philosophers have a name for this sort of situation: akrasia, or weakness of will in which one acts against his or her better judgment.

Akrasia is usually described as a type of “losing control,” and in some cases, I guess this is right.  Breaking a promise can be so sudden, so dramatic, it appears one has really lost his or her mind in the process. Losing control, however, is often more measured and self-conscious. I can see the transgression of my will coming from a long way off: I can anticipate the arrival of akrasia and how I will greet it at the doorway of a choice that I know I will have to make. In this case, it's very hard to say that I lose my head. If I’m honest, I know exactly what I am doing, or rather I can predict with a high degree of probability what I will do at a particularly decisive point in the future. The philosopher J.L. Austen describes the slow, calculated demise of one’s resolve.

I am very partial to ice cream, and a bombe is served divided into segments corresponding one to one with the persons at High Table: I am tempted to help myself to two segments and do so, thus succumbing to temptation and even conceivably (but why necessarily?) going against my principles. But do I lose control of myself? Do I raven, do I snatch the morsels from the dish and wolf them down, impervious to the consternation of my colleagues? Not a bit of it. We often succumb to temptation with calm and even with finesse.

Resolutions usually perish in this fashion, by way of premeditated murder. The more robust the resolution, the greater the clarity that I have about how and when I could give it up. Maybe I have given myself an absolute prohibition against drinking alcohol. How many transgressions am I granted before I’ve wholly violated my conviction? Strictly speaking, the answer is “exactly one.” But I’ve lived through many New Years and know that this isn’t exactly true. 

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"Many thinkers in the Western philosophical tradition have argued that the point of being a responsible adult is becoming the sort of being that can make promises—to others but also to oneself. And there is something to this"

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In Austin’s words, we typically “finesse” our akrasia: "I’ll just share my wife’s beer; I’ll just have half a beer. And then another half. I’ll leave a bit in the bottom of my glass.” Many resolutions are made and remade and made again. Eventually, they’re in such a shambles that they can’t really be called resolutions at all, just guiding principles or fond memories. Some of my most cherished promises have died by a thousand well-placed cuts.