What if you were never going to change the thing about you that you so desperately long to change? I think, for a lot of people, that’s quite a liberating thought. Maybe reconciling yourself to certain ways that you are is a more powerful thing.Ī psychotherapist called Bruce Tift has this really interesting thought experiment: Whatever it is that you dislike most about yourself-your short temper or your lack of self-discipline-just imagine if that thing was going to be with you in some form ’til the end of your life. Maybe you don’t need to change in some particular way. And that doesn’t leave any room for the thought that maybe you’re more okay than you thought. I do think that probably one of the pitfalls of New Year’s–resolution culture is that it encourages us all to buy into the idea that you need to make some big change in order to be a minimally acceptable, worthwhile person. But it’s also so obviously the case that there are people who are punishing themselves in some way or another through exercise. It’s so obviously the case that more physical exercise can improve the quality of some people’s lives. The crucial question we have to ask ourselves is why we’re doing things. There are some activities where it’s pretty hard to suggest that they would be a part of anybody’s meaningful life. Nyce: Are you totally topic agnostic? Like, if your goal is to eat more cupcakes in 2023, go for it?īurkeman: I suppose I’m not 100 percent topic agnostic. Anything could be the most important thing for a given person to focus on. Do you think those are worth considering, given our finite amount of time on the planet?īurkeman: I don’t think it’s a question of the subject matter. Nyce: A lot of the most popular resolutions are around money and eating and losing weight. I don’t think fresh starts like that are actually possible, and I don’t think aiming to make them is the healthiest way to change. I do think that in the culture of New Year’s resolutions, there’s a really heavy dose of perfectionism-a sense in which it’s all about starting completely afresh and being completely perfect in some area of life from this day forward. Brooks: New Year’s resolutions that will actually lead to happiness It helps you get a lot of clarity about which kinds of resolutions are really worth using your precious time on and which are not.Īrthur C. Confronting how short our lives are, and how limited our time is, is actually a sort of precondition for doing meaningful things, including making personal changes. Oliver Burkeman: I don’t think the fact that we’re all going to die means that setting intentions for personal changes is automatically a bad thing. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.Ĭaroline Mimbs Nyce: Do you think New Year’s resolutions are worth making, considering we’re all going to die, as your book posits so bluntly? I caught up with him to discuss New Year’s–resolution making and breaking, and why you should consider not setting your resolutions until mid-January. He is the author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mere Mortals (4,000 weeks is about the length of the average American’s life span). Oliver Burkeman is a writer who focuses on this nexus of mortality and productivity. New Year’s resolutions are a time for reflection-a chance to think about the limited time we have on this Earth and how to use it wisely.
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