‘New year, new you’ doesn’t work. Here’s how you can actually improve your life.
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. “New Year, New You": The traditional slogan encapsulates both the promise and the hopelessness of our annual attempt at personal transformation. On the one hand, January 1 feels pregnant with the potential for a fresh start, a reboot, a decisive repudiation of all the botched efforts and missteps of the past.
On the other hand, if any of that really worked, there would be far fewer people in the market for a new beginning, year after year. Many of us are familiar with the experience of making New Year’s resolutions to boost our physical fitness, get on top of the to-do list, save money, be less irritable around the kids and so on. What keeps us from accomplishing those things is rarely a lack of self-discipline, or needing a more efficient system for building healthier habits.
More often, it’s the very attempt to make sweeping changes—to “become unrecognizable," in the parlance of contemporary self-help—that stands in the way of a different, happier and more meaningful life. It unfolds like this. You want the benefits you think you’d get from, say, taking up running, so you resolve to become a runner.
You buy the shoes, download the relevant app to track your progress and watch some tutorials on YouTube. Maybe you even get as far as your first few runs.But then something goes wrong. Perhaps the prospect of executing the same wholesome actions, every day for the rest of your life, suddenly strikes you as intolerably monotonous and oppressive.
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