New Year's Resolutions and Pericles

On New Year's Eve, I went for a midnight walk through Salt Lake City. Fireworks illuminated the sky, punctuated by the smoke from the glowing refineries, while the streets below sat quiet in that suspended stillness unique to the first hour of the new year. As I walked, I listened to Pericles' Funeral Oration — once, twice, and then a third time.

It is remarkable to hear the past commemorate the dead while watching the living celebrate the future.

As I walked and listened, I noticed that Pericles did not use a moment of mass grief to turn inward. He did not urge Athenians to reassess their happiness or examine their inner lives. Standing before widows, orphans, and a city at war, he did the opposite: he directed their gaze toward the city, the common good, and the obligations that had made their fallen worth honoring in the first place.

"Our system of government does not copy the institutions of our neighbors. It is more the case of our being a model to others."

Pericles understood what we have largely forgotten: a people cannot survive on introspection. They require shared duty, shared sacrifice, and a vision larger than the atomized self.

That night in Salt Lake City, with fireworks bursting overhead, the contrast was impossible to ignore. We greet the new year almost entirely through inward-facing resolutions — health goals, productivity systems, self-improvement routines. None of these are evil at face value. But taken together, they reveal something that is: modern man believes that dissatisfaction with himself must be cured by more self-analysis.

It will not.

When I was in high school, I worked as a security officer in downtown Austin. Austin is known for its homelessness problem, though "problem" is an understatement. There are thousands of men and women living on the streets. I spoke often with people society prefers to mock — from a distance, of course — men who had not merely fallen into homelessness, but had aged inside it.

I remember one man in particular. Old not because homelessness came late to him, but because it had been the defining condition of his life. Age simply happened while he lived that way. There are thousands like him.

What struck me then — and strikes me more now — was not only the misery, but the permanence. In modern America, it is possible to survive without working. You may live poorly, even filthily, but you will not starve. That is the level of affluence we inhabit: even the lowest rung is insulated from existential necessity.

Pericles would have recognized the danger immediately.

"We do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all."

Athens understood that a life without responsibility — to family, to city, to posterity — was not freedom. It was decay.

That same decay appears today under a different guise. Consider today's undergrad student. He has been conditioned to believe that it is normal to switch majors repeatedly, to graduate into work unrelated to one's field, to drift indefinitely. Purposelessness has been normalized and even celebrated. We are told to keep our options open, that identity is fluid, that commitment is oppressive — even that one's biological sex is optional.

But abundance never clarifies. It paralyzes.

Now imagine you are hungry and inexplicably crave spaghetti. You go to the grocery store intending to be efficient. But when you reach the pasta sauce aisle, you freeze. Hundreds of brands. Prices. Sizes. Flavors. One ingredient — tomato paste — now offers endless variation. Which one is right? Does it even matter?

Then you realize the same problem repeats for every item on your list.

Even this analogy assumes something increasingly rare: that you know what you want. More aptly, you'd never make it to the store at all. You'd only know that you are hungry for something, but after hours of scrolling and distraction, you cannot name it.

This is the condition of modern man. We are told to "follow our hearts," but what if the heart has no direction? What if it has never been trained to desire anything beyond comfort?

Pericles offered a harsher, truer alternative:

"Happiness depends on being free, and freedom depends on being courageous."

Not courageous in self-expression — but courageous in obligation.

Return to the grocery aisle. Picture another man — hurried, yet calm and decisive. He scans the shelves briefly, selects a jar, drops it into his basket, and moves on. You grab him by the coat and ask, "Wait — is that the right one?"

He laughs. "I've never made spaghetti before," he says. "But my wife is having our third child, and I need to feed the kids before I rush to the hospital."

And he is gone.

This man is not searching for his true pasta. He is serving his true loves. His confidence does not come from self-knowledge; it comes from responsibility. Others depend on him, and that dependence has ordered his world.

Pericles understood this ordering force. His speech did not praise individuality. Rather, he praised men who sacrificed themselves for the fulfillment of their fellow Athenians. The paradox is that their sacrifice is precisely what made their lives most fulfilling.

This attacks the lie of our age: that true fulfillment is found in avoiding responsibility, in delaying commitment, in preserving optionality forever. This path promises contentment and delivers anxiety.

Man was not made for endless introspection. He was made for responsibility.

Walking through Salt Lake City that night — the burn of cold air in my lungs, the fireworks bursting like so many dying stars above my head, Pericles in my ears — the message was unmistakable and now unforgettable. A civilization cannot hope to renew itself by staring into the mirror, navel-gazing, and primping.

It renews itself only by remembering what is owed — to the past, to the present, and to the future.

The antidote to the ubiquitous poison of our affluent age is not stoicism. It is not hedonism. It is not self-optimization. It is not godless vitalism.

It is God-given responsibility — freely accepted, courageously borne.

So I encourage you: do not merely create more to-do lists, or even cut-lists. Remember instead that fulfillment is found only in sacrifice.

Take on more responsibility, and begin the new year well.