New Year’s Resolutions Are Thousands of Years Old
The popular story, checked against the evidence.
The Real Story
- Popular claim
- New Year's resolutions are a modern invention.
- Verdict
- Ancient
- The record
- Babylonians made new-year vows to their gods, and Romans made pledges to Janus; the custom is genuinely ancient.
The New Year’s resolution can feel like a modern ritual — gym memberships, self-improvement apps, the annual promise to eat better. In fact, the impulse to mark the turning year with a vow is one of the older continuous human habits, reaching back thousands of years.
The Babylonians
The ancient Babylonians are usually credited with the earliest known version. During a major festival at the start of their year — tied to the spring planting — they made promises to their gods: to return borrowed objects, to pay debts, to behave rightly in the coming year. Keeping these vows, they believed, would earn the favour of the gods; breaking them would bring disfavour. The bones of the modern resolution — a fresh start, a promise, consequences for failing — are all there.
The Romans and Janus
The Romans gave the custom a shape closer to ours, and a name we still use. They dedicated the beginning of the year to Janus, the two-faced god who looked backward into the old year and forward into the new — the deity from whom January takes its name. Romans made pledges of good conduct to Janus and exchanged good wishes and tokens as the year turned. Reflecting on the past while resolving to do better in the future was, quite literally, built into how they imagined the threshold of the year.
Later, Christian and other traditions layered their own new-year reflections and resolutions on top, and the modern secular version — self-improvement without the gods — is simply the latest form. The through-line is remarkably steady: humans mark the reset of the calendar by promising to be better.
The verdict
Ancient. New Year’s resolutions descend from genuinely old customs — Babylonian vows to the gods and Roman pledges to Janus — not from modern self-help. It is a rare case where a habit that feels contemporary really does reach back millennia, of the kind we enjoy tracing in where holiday traditions really come from.
Sources
- “New Year’s resolution,” Wikipedia.
- Histories of the Roman god Janus and Babylonian new-year festivals.
