On New Year's Resolutions

Commonplace Newsletter #111

Sir William Nicholson, Double Anemones 1921

As you can imagine, I’ve watched a lot of Christmas films over the last week or so. The themes are still reverberating in my mind as I write this during the lead up to New Year’s Eve. Family, friends, faith, redemption, love, joy, miracles. All of it. But one minor motif sticks out in my mind above all others, for some reason. And that, in repeated variations across various stories, is the figure of the young child, messy-haired and precocious and on the precipice of succumbing to the glum cynicism of the grown-ups¹. The child is invariably annoyingly inquisitive² and this persistent questioning- the barrage of why? and what for? that they fire out- act as an unknowing rebuke for the adults who quickly shut them down with dismissals, appeals to authority and other manoeuvres from the accepted playbook of adulthood. They do this because they must, because whys when stacked up one after another have a way of making the whole edifice of this world we have created and accepted crumble. And this cannot be allowed to happen.

Why?
Because I said so...

The intellectual foundation that most of us have built our lives upon is shallow to non-existent. The building materials are a mixed bag to say the least and the assembly is a Friday afternoon bodge-job³ at best. The persistent whys and what fors reveal this. As anyone who has been interrogated by a smart aleck child knows it takes maybe four whys in a row before the veneer of adult knowing falls apart completely. The first why is easy to answer, the second why requires pulling from the jigsaw puzzle of stock answers and handed-down cliches. Further whys beyond this and things start becoming worryingly existential. Mystical even. Why? Because evidently virtually everything we think we know is just habitually cobbled together received wisdom and dogma. Why? Because like everything else the worldview we construct from ready-made pieces that are designed to fit together in a prescribed way is a form of whistling in the dark, a distraction from our own finitude.

Why?

Oh. Shut. Up.

I’m not trying to start the New Year off on a despairing note -quite the opposite- I promise, but the knee-jerk desire to dismiss and suppress thinking about the seeming meaninglessness at the root of it all must be overcome. Running away from it gets us nowhere. We need more of this persistent childlike inquisitiveness and thirst for understanding. We need it because- if nothing else- it will turn the whole New Year’s resolution thing on its head and prevent it from continuing to be the annual masochistic custom that so many people habitually enter into every single January.

Instead, courageously following where the whys or the what fors lead can prevent so much needless heartache and wasted effort and damaging self-flagellation and denigration. Truly interrogating the why behind goals and resolutions is an eye opening experience. We quickly discover that so many goals are not our own at all, and that they have been planted there by television, social media, institutions (which can also take the form of accepted paradigms) and other external forces- all played back to us by the people in our lives who follow these instructions without question. And so it should come as no surprise when so many fail to put in the kind of tenacious, dogged, week-in-week-out persistence and effort that real change and growth require when the goal being sought is not even something that the individual truly, in-their-heart cared about in the first place. No amount of motivational speeches, montages set to piano music, caffeine or podcasts can make you persist in indefinitely walking down a path that you don’t truly want to walk down. And yet so many of us keep half-heartedly playing this losing game regardless. Dusting yourself off and trying again can be a noble act and it is simply a fact that very few worthwhile achievements in life are realised on the first attempt. But there is a difference between steadfastness and obstinacy, between endurance and blockheaded refusal to learn your lesson and stop throwing good money after bad.

At best, we end up treating the symptoms instead of the cause.

As much as it may be a shame to see people give up on their New Year’s resolutions, it is just as much of a shame that more people don’t come to their senses and give up on pursing a barely considered ambition much sooner. Rucking further down the wrong road only means that the journey to get back to where you started will be longer.

I know this is controversial talk and antithetical to the success mantras of the metric obsessed, performative, materialistic, linear, Key Performance Indicator driven world we live in, but someone needs to play the role of the annoying child who questions lazily adhered to and potentially harmful conventions, if only to stress-test them. I mean, who says you have to achieve anything anyway? Or do anything? Or ‘improve’ in any way?

And if there were no competition, no (largely imagined) crowd of onlookers sizing you up and judging you what would your goals be then, if anything? If you could achieve your wildest ambition but no one ever found out about it, if no one praised you for it would you still want it? Unsettling questions, aren’t they? It can be a shock to the system to discover either how shallow or other-centred our motivations are or just how much they differ from what we assume them to be when we really start to investigate and dig below the surface.

Through such investigation what I have found- and I am convinced I am completely unexceptional in this regard- is that the root motivation for everything are acceptance, love, and peace (as cliched as these goals may sound to those who are not used to openly speaking in such terms). We want to earn x amount so we can buy and do y which in turn mean we will (we imagine) be loved and appreciated by z. If we were in better shape, more successful, more together, more educated, had this or that status signifier then we would be more admired, more respected, more loved. More lovable.

But specialness, desire and authority are not the same thing as acceptance, love and peace.

Resolutions fail and goals- even if achieved- rarely satisfy because they are misguided ploys or ways of jumping through hoops to mask the absence of acceptance, love and peace or they are ways of deferring from the duty to love others. Maybe I’m naive and I am far, far from a perfect exemplar of this but I truly believe that when one focuses on these ways of being above all then the standard New Year’s resolution objects- a six pack, for example- may well be achieved as a by-product (because the self-destructive patterns that prevent it will naturally fall by the wayside) or will cease to be a source of dissatisfaction.

How many people have the goal of inner peace as their New Year’s resolution? Now I’m not talking about people who make a knowingly superficial resolution for fun, the kind that they will likely achieve. I’m talking about those who think they are making a straightforward resolution (such as losing weight, cutting down on alcohol, reducing social media usage)- but for whom there is layer upon layer of unpicking needed to get to the root of the issue.

I could be wrong of course, but inner acceptance, love and peace in my experience are the only things that don’t reduce to meaninglessness when hit repeatedly with a succession of child-like whys.

They are the only things that makes sense.

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1. If one is to practice cynicism, then do it or don’t do it. That is, cynicism also needs to be applied to cynicism. The same can be said of scepticism.

2. Though I will proceed to make a case for the utility of such ‘childlike’ inquisitiveness into your own beliefs and motivations I am aware that children often continually ask questions just to be intentionally annoying. Because deliberately annoying people and getting a rise out of them can be fun at that age. And at any age, really.

3. For the pedants I want to point out that where I’m from at least to ‘bodge’ is to cobble together a makeshift solution that for the moment works even though it is ugly and will almost certainly break. Whereas to ‘botch’ something is to do it completely wrong and is used as a term of scorn. When you botch a job you fail at it, when you bodge a job it shouldn’t work yet somehow just about does.