We do not need a resolution
You don’t need to frantically explain for the seventeenth year running why you’re not setting new year’s resolutions in a bid to get validation and forgiveness from your peers.
It’s the torturous first week of January. My Instagram, Substack, life, is full of people mourning the dumpster fire of 2025 and desperately trying to reinvent themselves, newborn and fresh for 2026. This new year seems to have also given rise to a new phenomenon - people trying to reinvent the new year in and of itself. It’s not even really the new year, they say. Why don’t we do it in spring? The fire horse won’t gallop into our lives til March. Shall we check back in summer? You can’t set new goals when it’s cold. We’ll do them at a nicer time. A sunshine time. Be kind. Be gentle. January is hard.
What seems to be missing from these plans is the simple fact that we don’t actually need to game the system to make it more bearable, we could instead choose to wilfully disengage.
The idea that so much of what governs our days doesn’t exist, including time, is liberating at some times and terrifying at others, but it’s a distant flickering light that guides me when I’m drowning in the minutiae of a rule I’ve created for myself, or someone who doesn’t care about my wellbeing has created for me. There are some manmade things that are pretty hard to divest from. Currency, the moral structure we’ve built our societies on. It’s hard (though not entirely impossible) to live fruitfully outside of those boundaries.
But it’s not hard to not partake in rituals that don’t serve you. You don’t need to frantically explain for the seventeenth year running why you’re not setting new year’s resolutions in a bid to get validation and forgiveness from your peers. You can simply not do it. Don’t give it oxygen, don’t take responsibility for it.
You do not need permission to not give yourself a list of things you know in your heart you’re going to fail at and not only that, you know you’re going to punish yourself for, even though nobody was ever going to hold you accountable. There’s no divine being who is going to come for you at the end of the year because you didn’t lose 25lbs and retrain as a counsellor. Your friends won’t remember what nonsense you committed to, even if you tell them. You can simply not do it.
I’m not making an argument for stasis, though ultimately it’s your choice if you want to remain unchanged for the next thirty years. I would just like to untangle us from this capitalist idea of resolutions that is ultimately rooted in a heady cocktail of self-obsession and self-loathing packaged as self-improvement.
You can make decisions every single day that change your life. When you apply for a job in February, when the sun comes out finally in March and you go for a really long walk in a place you’ve never been that makes your brain feel calmer than it has in months, when you make a friend who “gets you” in May, when you write an awful poem in June that ends up being a slightly better poem by August, do you attribute those things to goal setting or do you dismiss them as just things that a person does?
Perhaps I’m missing something. As a species we love a rule. I love a parameter. I love instructions, a yard stick to measure against. But I like the things that help me function in a world full of noise, and not things that arbitrarily hinder me or make me feel bad.
The act of living a life is a constant act of goal fulfilment. Every day that you try, even if you don’t want to, you’re changing in imperceptible ways.
And there is more important work to be done than giving up chocolate for the 400th time. Go talk to your neighbour, care for an animal, use your privilege to help someone, make a baby laugh, volunteer to clean up your local park, body double with a friend, make conscious choices, be less wasteful, decolonise your lifestyle, donate to a food bank, take a spider outside, still living. Give yourself a chance.