[…] Many of us are familiar with the experience of making New Year’s resolutions to boost our physical fitness, get on top of the to-do list, save money, be less irritable around the kids and so on. What keeps us from accomplishing those things is rarely a lack of self-discipline, or needing a more efficient system for building healthier habits. More often, it’s the very attempt to make sweeping changes—to “become unrecognizable,” in the parlance of contemporary self-help—that stands in the way of a different, happier and more meaningful life. […]
The truth is that the appeal of a “New You” doesn’t have to do with exercising more, making more money or accomplishing any other concrete change. Rather, it’s about obtaining a sense of security and control over life. With a new year beginning, we want to finally feel that we’re in the driver’s seat when it comes to our health, finances, personality traits and so on. We want to rid ourselves of the feeling, so vividly described by the English novelist Arnold Bennett, that “the years slip by, and slip by, and slip by, and that [we] have not yet been able to get [our] lives into proper working order.” […]
Buying the equipment and watching the tutorials—or, to confess my own particular weakness, drawing up beautiful schedules in overpriced notebooks—all help fuel the feeling that control lies just around the next corner. By contrast, actually making a change in your life, here and now, requires the surrender of control. It demands that you exercise for 20 minutes today, even if you don’t have the best running shoes, with no certainty that you’ll enjoy the experience or manage to turn it into a long-term habit. Maybe you’ll never do it even once again. Who can say? […]
Really, though, life as a finite human is better understood as piloting a little one-person kayak down an unpredictable river. We don’t get to know what’s coming next—when the peaceful or challenging or terrifying periods might arise. Everything rests on our capacity to navigate from moment to moment, making the best decisions we can, and not allowing ourselves to be disheartened by the ways in which our journey doesn’t exactly map the plans we might have had for it. In this situation, the only action that really matters is the one you take right now.
Indeed, the very notion of “New Year, New You” crumbles under examination. By definition, the only person who could ever engineer a New You would be Old You, with all his or her familiar issues. In trying to erase our past selves, we become like Baron Munchausen in the old German stories, who tried to drag himself out of a swamp by pulling on his own hair.
Freedom lies not in this futile struggle to become someone else but in consciously accepting who we really are and starting from there. […] Instead of “becoming unrecognizable,” the New Year should be a time to commit to what I like to call “radical doability.” […]
Read more here.
— Oliver Burkeman, from ‘New Year, New You’ Doesn’t Work. Here’s How You Can Actually Improve Your Life. Instead of resolving to become a different person in 2025, try setting achievable goals and embracing ‘radical doability.’ (wsj.com, December 28, 2024)
Image via Freestocks
