There’s something wonderful about the start of a new year. Just saying the words 2024 in my mouth feels like savoring a tart cherry lozenge. 2024, 2024, 2024. What will this year bring? For one, I am finally back on this project! Or trying to be back at writing this Substack more regularly, if not on a weekly basis. That’s one of my aspirations this year. My published post of the week certainly isn’t the end goal itself, but it feels like an important benchmark to aspire to, if I can, in service to the larger goal. The goal is the process, I think, of sitting down to write—even if it’s on something small. And to be in a different mode of writing—a more frictionless thinking/writing, as if I were writing a letter to a dear friend.
With all of that being said, I wanted to reflect on the state of the new years resolution today. Is it still relevant? Why does the new years resolution feel like it’s fallen out of fashion? And, was it ever in fashion at all? Maybe I’m not in the right demographic spaces, but I don’t think a single person my age asked me if I had any resolutions, nevertheless what they were this year. And in being a very pro-new years resolution person, I wanted to share what I hope this year will bring.
Growing up, and likely influencing my subsequent interests in self-improvement, development, and growth (!), I remember participating in some family-facilitated time at the start of a new year to think about my resolutions, and to share them aloud. My resolutions (to get all As etc.) were quite banal, but would get tacked up on our fridge with a magnet nonetheless, until the magnet fell off and the paper was swept away.
Regardless, the experience of “marking” time and distinguishing one year from another felt like an important practice. First, it necessitated a “taking stock” of what happened in the past year. One my favorite podcasts Critics at Large discussed the rise of “slowness culture” in their recent episode Can Slowness Save Us? And, despite the radical potential (or not) of slowness culture, I deeply agree in that slowness, or taking a moment of reflective pause allows us to reclaim a sense of feeling time. But I think the new years resolution also does something different, because it enables us to look into the future.
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A new years resolution operates as a seesaw that bridges the past to the future. It acts as a mediative tool, of considering what occurred and what we hope the new year will bring. And while none of my waxing is groundbreaking in any way, I want to emphasize that future part of a writing a resolution. The new years resolution exists as the proto-manifestation of an older generation, wrapped in a sensible practicality that feels akin to writing a grocery list.
Still, I have several qualms with self-improvement discourse writ large. For one, not everything needs to be about change nor “progress” nor improvement—for instance, the resolution to maintain something is just as a wonderful. So this isn’t the post that will tell you how to actually meet your new years resolutions with SMART goals or the Harvard Business Review “self-management” think piece, but I think if you want change something in your life, you need to be able to imagine it, and to wish for it first. That’s all a resolution is. And with that, I guess the enemy of the new years resolution is the frenetic mind-numbing bliss of oppressive routines, and a futile nihilism that this year will be the same as all the ones before it. That sentiment feels like a giving up before the next game—the infinite game—has started. So even if the paper you wrote your resolution on gets lost—you still willed your resolutions into the world. You took stock of the past and chose to start a “new” year :)
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