Brain Food #720
Dealing with broken resolutions
Thoughts of the day
New year’s resolutions do not tend to last long, with most being broken by February. We overestimate our abilities to fulfill all our yearly goals within a fixed amount of days and underestimate how much time existing commitments will take away from us.
Some resolutions might also be abandoned because we do not choose what we aim to achieve within the frame of what we can control. Setting resolutions is a way to maintain control over our lives, but in the complexity of the world, there are so many factors at play that are beyond our powers to influence. What is within our control over the course of a year can wildly change.
And much of our anxiety, according to the Stoics, stems from this very lack of control. Epictetus wrote, “When I see an anxious person, I ask myself, what do they want? For if a person wasn’t wanting something outside of their own control, why would they be stricken by anxiety?”
Ultimately, this sense of control we crave can be found through a sense of self-determination, the feeling that we are acting based on our intrinsic values and desires, within the playing field we have been given. We can still think of our progress towards something we believe in as an achievement, even if the goalposts might move.
A constant need for self-improvement, paired with a drive for success, can become counterintuitive when we do not give ourselves enough space and time to simply be content with what we have.
And, more importantly, setting goals for an entire year might go against a very basic principle of success, and even happiness: being able to change our minds.
I recently published a longer piece on making non-resolutions, which you can read here.
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