Changes

The tradition of New Years resolutions continued to be religious for some, particularly Protestants, who often would write down their resolutions and periodically check to see they fulfilled them during the year. More recent studies have shown that countries tend to have different types of focus when it comes to making resolutions. In India, it is more common to wish for a prosperous future or better career prospects. In the United States and Egypt, health was the most common resolution, where both countries struggle with obesity. Australia and Japan focused on love or finding a soulmate. In Russia, it was common for individuals to wish for a successful education for their children or others. For many others, having good finances were the most common, in many ways similar to the first New Year resolution known to us from Babylonia, which emphasized getting out of debts. A more recent study using Twitter showed that the top online resolutions were: diet and exercise, reading more, learning something new, saving money, be nicer, get a better job, giving to charity, drinking less, sleeping more, and making new friends.<ref>For a recent study on using social media to know what resolutions people make, see: Zhu, Dandan, Yusuke Fukazawa, Eleftherios Karapetsas, and Jun Ota. 2012. “Long-Term Goal Discovery in the Twitter Posts through the Word-Pair LDA Model.” In <i>Advances in Natural Language Processing</i>, edited by Hitoshi Isahara and Kyoko Kanzaki, 7614:262–67. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33983-7_26.</ref>