New Year’s Resolutions

Following my recent ‘not a blog post’ — in which I got inspired to Actually Start Blogging regularly — and my subsequent not writing a blog post for 10 days, I’m going to try and Actually Write another post.

Again, though, I’m low on time. It’s 10pm on a Thursday and I’m feeling pumped up, though as soon as I start writing I feel my eyelids start to droop… Still, I feel the only way to Actually Do This regularly is to actually do it… regularly. So here goes, I guess.

(side note: there is a non-trivial chance that this blog ends up being a never-ending string of posts 10 days apart that essentially have no content other than “ok, I’m actually gonna start blogging now”. If this happens, you have my permission to shoot me (virtually)). < where should this full stop go??

A thing that I want to do that I may be more likely to do if I write a blog about it is New Year’s Resolutions (NYRs). So that’s what I’m gonna do.

Firstly, NYRs are corny as fuck.

If you read the title of this blog post, or the first paragraph, and decided that I was lame or that you didn’t want to read it or something, I don’t blame you. If I were you, I would do the same.

NYRs have the stench of phony ambition, mild self-loathing and flawed goal setting. They’re just a cliché which never actually lead to positive change, but act more as a yearly purge of guilt, where it doesn’t matter if we actually do the things we want to do with our lives, as long as we at least appear to show that we want to (cos we know we’re never really going to).

NYRs are a yearly synonym for our shared cultural understanding that, try as we might (or might not, as the case may be), we’re really just too deeply flawed and lazy to ever live up to being the people we really want to be (or think we want to be).

But, despite all that — despite NYRs being just about the lamest, corniest and most cliched idea in the self-improvement book — I think they can maybe be great.

The reason they can be great is quite simple. The argument goes something like this:

1. There are ways in which my life is not perfect (as in the ideal life, according to what I actually value)
2. There are probably simple things I could do to make my life robustly better (again, according to my values)
3. I’m not currently doing many of these things
4. I’d probably be more likely to do them if I a) knew what they were and b) told myself and others that I was going to commit to them

All four of these seem either certainly true or very likely to be true. 1 is probably true for (almost) everyone. I assume 2 to be true for most people — i.e., I take it that most sets of plausible values have associated sets of simple actions that make lives robustly better, according to those values. 3 is certain for me and will be true for all people for whom 1 is true. 4a seems necessarily true and 4b seems true based on my understanding of psychology.

So, all in all, it seems like NYRs — when some time is put into formulating them — are pretty likely to be pretty high-value things. Specifically, it seems like they are likely to be good if you do the following things (rather than just plumping at a generic list of ‘things I probably should do but don’t really want to’):

1. Work out, specifically, the main ways in which your life is not as you want it to be
2. Work out simple actions which are likely to move your actual life closer to that life-as-you-want-it-to-be
3. Resolve to do (some of) the actions at some specific frequency (ideally with some mechanism to check in or make sure you do them)
4. Tell yourself and others that you’re actually going to do the things

Spending some serious time doing the above seems likely to be one of the best things to do with free time at the end of the year. I find it hard not to get really excited about the idea.

(side note: I imagine many people, including me-from-a-few-years-ago, would get kinda scared more than excited about this idea. I think this is maybe because the idea of living an ‘ideal life’ seems kinda scary and like something you should do but don’t really want to. To this I say that the ‘ideal life’ is not the one you think you should live but don’t really want to; it’s the one that, on reflection, you actually want to live and feel excited about living. I think terms like ‘ideal life’ conjure up the idea of a socially constructed ‘best life’, which is not what I mean. I’m talking about your best life, according to what you actually care about, not what people tell you to care about).

So, I plan to spend some solid time in December thinking about what my ideal NYRs for 2021 will be. Some preliminary ideas include:

1. Exercise every day
2. Meditate every day
3. Blog once a week
4. Do a course of CBT
5. Something to do with getting a sleep schedule

Hopefully, I’ll refine these and find more when I actually think about this properly. Then, hopefully, by this time next year I’ll be that bit closer to living the kind of life I want to live. And (in the words of EA Khaled) We Iterate.

Care to join me?