There is a sense in which New Year's Resolutions are about desire, because they reflect what we want to achieve or attain or acquire in the next 12 months. In Letter 27 to Lucilius, Seneca has the following to say to his friend regarding desire:
"Loud and clear I tell myself: 'Count your years, and you will be ashamed to have the same wishes and intentions you had as a child. Give yourself this gift as your day of death approaches: let your faults die before you. Dismiss those turbulent desires that cost you so much: they do harm both ahead of time and after the fact. Just as the worry over criminal acts does not depart, even if they are not discovered at the time, so also with wrongful desires: remorse remains when they themselves are gone. They are not solid, not dependable: even if they do no harm, they are fleeting. Look about, rather, for some good that will remain. There is none but that which the mind discovers for itself from out of itself. Virtue alone yields lasting and untroubled joy. Even if something does get in the way of that joy, it is interrupted only as daylight is by clouds, which pass beneath but do not overcome it.' When will it be your lot to attain that joy? You have not been idle up to now -- but pick up the pace. Much work remains to be done; and you must be the one to put in the attention and toil if you want results. This is not something that can be delegated."
"Loud and clear I tell myself: 'Count your years, and you will be ashamed to have the same wishes and intentions you had as a child. Give yourself this gift as your day of death approaches: let your faults die before you. Dismiss those turbulent desires that cost you so much: they do harm both ahead of time and after the fact. Just as the worry over criminal acts does not depart, even if they are not discovered at the time, so also with wrongful desires: remorse remains when they themselves are gone. They are not solid, not dependable: even if they do no harm, they are fleeting. Look about, rather, for some good that will remain. There is none but that which the mind discovers for itself from out of itself. Virtue alone yields lasting and untroubled joy. Even if something does get in the way of that joy, it is interrupted only as daylight is by clouds, which pass beneath but do not overcome it.' When will it be your lot to attain that joy? You have not been idle up to now -- but pick up the pace. Much work remains to be done; and you must be the one to put in the attention and toil if you want results. This is not something that can be delegated."
My own desires seem to have evolved as I have grown older. When I was younger, for example, pleasures were never far from my mind. Now that I am middle-aged, I spend more time pondering virtue. I would like to believe that this is the result of me becoming wiser with age; however, a cynical person might observe that I am just experiencing one of the inevitable consequences of aging -- as pleasures become less frequent, we desire other things in their place.
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Seneca, Letters on Ethics to Lucilius, Translated with an Introduction and Commentary by Margaret Graver and A.A. Long (University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2015), Letter 27, 2-4, page 95.
