During a family dinner over winter break, my mom asked the inevitable question, “What are your New Year’s resolutions?”
Over the years, I’ve half-heartedly resolved to eat healthier, reach out to old friends, learn how to cook, read more — all the usual strides towards what we hope will positively contribute to our new cycle around the sun. But as the Times Square confetti is swept away each year, life goes back to the repetition of day-to-day experience, and commitment to our resolutions often ceases after a few weeks.
In her New York Times article “How to Make (and Keep) a New Year’s Resolution,” Jen Miller advocates for making our resolutions “SMART,” an acronym outlining five standards for successful goal-setting. These standards are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound.
2020 was rough for everyone, and I personally could not handle the added pressure of a new variable in my everyday routine. A New Year’s resolution felt like a superfluous and unnecessary obligation when all of my energy was going towards just getting through the day.
It sounds bleak, I know. But I needed to make any resolutions malleable or else they’d crack under the pressure of expectation and stringency.
So I decided in 2021 that my resolutions would be anything but “SMART.” The more “SMART” my goals were, the more rigid the expectations became, and the more disappointed I became when life got in the way and I failed to hold up my commitment.
My journal entry from Jan. 11 reads, “I think my biggest goal for 2021 is to live more. This is so vague, but I’ll give myself the freedom to choose what this means to me as the year progresses.”
Exactly 11 months later, my journal entry on Dec. 11 reads, “As 2021 draws to a close, I think that this is the one year I’ve actually followed through with my New Year’s resolution. I did live more. I don’t think I need to define or explain what that means. I just lived more than I ever have.”
I won’t sit here and preach about all the things that have helped me “live more,” because our conceptions of living are ultimately subjective. But I followed through with my resolution because it was liberating to live under a general principle rather than to obsess over deadlines or measured expectations.
If you’ve struggled with sticking to a resolution in the past, try making this year’s resolution as ill-defined as possible. Make it something that can’t be reduced to quantification or measured progress.
I know it seems counterintuitive. How can you ultimately feel a sense of achievement if there are no parameters for progress?
I’d argue that this is exactly why an abstract resolution yields the most success, especially for those who have failed to follow through in the past. Erring doesn’t feel like failure because the boundaries for failure don’t exist. In its amorphousness, the resolution bends to accommodate however you go about fulfilling it.
But if the resolution is more rigidly measurable, a lack of expected progress and achievement can create that paralyzing sense of stagnation and subsequent apathy.
Conversely, I’m aware that measured progress can be motivating. The feeling of success and personal achievement produces that sugary dopamine high. But I’m speaking for the people who’ve previously tried taking “SMART” steps and haven’t found their footing.
The difficulty with abstract resolutions primarily lies in finding one. It’s easy to pinpoint physical changes we want to implement, but abstract ones are tricky to grasp onto. My advice is to sit with your intuition and reflect on the past year. When you think about the previous year, what feeling arises?
As I looked back on 2020, I felt regret that a year had passed me by, but I also felt grateful realizing how much I previously took for granted. I combined those two feelings into the resolution to live more, which meant incorporating more presence and gratitude into my life.
If you felt oversaturated in 2021, try incorporating more silence into 2022. Or if 2021 was marked by stress, you can resolve to make 2022 all about worrying less. Or if external obligations got too out of hand, your resolution could be to prioritize yourself.
I understand this could just be the way that I function and that others thrive under rigidity. If more structured goals motivate you toward commitment, then by all means go ahead. But if you’ve struggled with commitment to measurable goals, try loosening the reins. Make your goals overarching and abstract, and see whether this guiding principle yields greater results in the long run.
