Revolving Resolutions
have not reached my reading goal :(
I saw a man typing out his 2025 resolutions on the tube yesterday. It was being written in the Notes app, a place for ephemeral thoughts and reminders, existential concerns and shopping lists, messages to friends slyly slid over tables in noisy bars. Maybe that’s the best place to record statements of intent that will likely go unfulfilled and forgotten; there’s something more concrete about writing down your goals on paper, making them a physical object, that can’t be matched by the neatness of digital documentation. Even if the end result (not doing what you said you were going to do) is the same, there’s a bit more guilt when you look back at the hopeful handwriting of an optimistic you with year-end eyes jaded by all that’s come in between. On a phone, it feels both more official and less personal.
All of this is being said by someone who has not yet set out her resolutions, which I’ve been meaning to do for the past few weeks. It is now New Year’s Eve, I have less than three hours until I need to be at my friend’s house, and my big plans for 2025 are all still half concepts in my mind.
When I was younger, I did not play at all about my resolutions. I’d type out, on a typewriter, a longlist and shortlist of points, some of which required lengthy explanations or gameplans. At the end of the year, I’d duly type out my reflections on how they went. This was probably rooted in a sense of dissatisfaction with my life, and a desire to take control over the uncontrollable world of a 13-year-old, but did little to assuage my malaise in the cold, dark days of early January.
I still have all those lists, mistakes carefully edited out with correction tape, to remind me of what my priorities were a decade or so ago. Although I have changed significantly since then, in ways that matter and ways that don’t, threads have remained in the elements about myself and my environment that I want to change. Many of them are fairly universal, but felt far more personal at the time. Cut down on screen time; exercise more; eat healthily; none of these are groundbreaking. The first is on my list again this year, too. I’m not sure whether there has been any improvement in the meantime—it’s difficult to judge when even more is online now than it was when I was worrying about my eyesight at 14. I try not to look at how much time I spend on my laptop and reassure myself that the majority of my work involves The Screen, so I shouldn’t beat myself up about it. It’s harder to excuse how much time I spend on Twitter.
Despite the detail I liked to include, some entries across the years are frustratingly vague. There’s a general desire to be ‘better’, without any helpful metrics of what this might look like. Failure is built into these resolutions from the start—how can someone measure their progress in any meaningful way?
The cult of self improvement, long built into our culture, now feels more prevalent than ever. ‘Day in my life’ videos showcase aspirationally well-organised and polished lifestyles, ostensibly achievable (especially if you buy the recommended products); the increasing popularity of supplements and superfoods promise a better you on a 30-day subscription.
Regimes, challenges and joining discounts abound at the end of December, baiting anyone looking for some change in their lives, baiting anyone caught up in the post-Christmas fog. Any app that tracks and measures, from running to reading, encourages people to meet their end-of-year goals so they can rest easy knowing that they’ve enjoyed something they like the right amount. It’s also important to set an even more difficult target for the next year, making sure you’re sufficiently set up to disappoint yourself.
This time of year is an odd one. The pressure to wrap up everything that you’ve left unfinished can be suffocating, the desire to start the next year with a clean slate stressful. There’s also the impending gloom of January, a month with all the worst parts of winter and none of the festivities of December.
It makes sense, then, that this is the time people want to reinvent themselves, or feel a pressure to. When you can’t change the external circumstances, it’s logical to look internally for something to make the days feel a little more meaningful (or bearable). Even so, it often feels like a foregone conclusion that resolutions will be shed fairly early on in the year. It’s a running joke, people expecting themselves to fail before they even begin; yet each year the cycle repeats itself.
One of my main resolutions for 2025 is to be more mindful about how I spend my time. I know, I already sound unbearable, but hear me out. Far too often I find myself checking my phone during a conversational pause, or mindlessly switching between tabs on my laptop as I procrastinate a task that isn’t even unpleasant. Next year, I want to be more aware of where I am and what I’m doing, rather than drifting about in a constant state of mild dissatisfaction. This resolution has many of the faults I’ve mentioned—unspecific, unmeasurable, tied to a general sense of unhappiness that spikes in winter—but what can I say. Hopeless optimism is the tone of the season.