Your New Year’s resolutions are worthless. Okay, maybe not yours personally, but most people’s at least. How can resolutions hold any weight when nearly 80% of them are abandoned by February? (Forbes).
If you are anything like the majority of Harvard students, this is an unsettling statistic. Harvard students are ambitious. We are goal-oriented and accustomed to achieving many of the goals set by ourselves and society. We crave unimaginable success in every possible area of life, and to do anything less represents complete and utter failure. Frankly, we care. And we care not just about checking the boxes regarding values we hold dear, but about checking a million different boxes—getting into med school, sporting rock hard abs under our CS50™ T-shirts, and having a healthy and robust sex life (a box checked by no Harvard student ever).
So it makes sense that when I asked my friends to share their resolutions, they struggled to pick just one. Maybe adults warned you “You can’t keep burning the candle at both ends!” as a child, or today you shuttle on an endless loop from class to the gym to the quad and back. The reality is that when you care about everything, you cannot care enough about the things that really matter.
Like most, I have decided to try and get my shit together for 2022, or at least the month of January. For some reason, this motivated my purchase of the alarmingly millennial self-help book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson. While some of the examples in the book are clearly directed toward skinny jean-wearers, Manson’s wisdom is nonetheless useful. He writes, “We have so much fucking stuff and so many fucking opportunities that we don’t even know what to give a fuck about anymore.”
The fact that Harvard is a place of immense privilege is not breaking news, especially in terms of opportunity. We have access to some of the best research, cultural centers, and professors in the United States. Yet many of our New Year’s resolutions sound a lot closer to, “I want to lose 15 pounds” than, “I want to cure cancer.”
The problem with such resolutions is not that they are inherently shallow, but that the motivations behind them are. It is not intrinsically less valuable for someone to spend hours on the treadmill rather than in the lab, nor to chase fitness above academic success. If someone wants to lose weight to preserve their health, it is arguably more admirable than to work for recognition. The same is true of other resolutions we perceive as surface-level, from making more friends to sleeping more. If your resolutions are purely motivated and align with your deepest values, then they are worth pursuing. Unfortunately, this is not always the case.
Resolutions demand to be investigated, as they represent one’s long-term goals. It is critical to interrogate your own resolutions before making them. For example, does losing 15 pounds truly just mean being hotter than your ex? Does “get better grades” mean stop procrastinating, or does it mean take a bunch of GEMs to falsely inflate your GPA?
Goals themselves often entail no moral weight, but the motivations behind them do. Someone can resolve to get a consulting job because they are passionate about blending the corporate world with social enterprise, or simply because they want money. Even the money-seeking aspiring consultant can be greedy and desire a flashy new car, or trying to better support their struggling family. The resolution to “read more” can represent a draw toward literature and culture, or a social desire to keep up with know-it-all peers in the humanities. Resolutions reveal much about one’s raw self, even if that self is unclear to others.
You are the only person who can know your values and whether or not your resolutions align with said values. In Manson’s self-help book, he writes, “If you find yourself consistently giving too may fucks about trivial shit that bothers you—your ex-boyfriend’s new Facebook picture, how quickly the batteries die in the TV remote, missing out on yet another two-for-one sale on hand sanitizer—chances are you don’t have much going on in your life to give a legitimate fuck about. And that’s your real problem.” The same principle is true of your New Year’s resolutions.
No one can tell us our resolutions are trivial, but it is vital we ask that question of ourselves. It is vital that we each find some form of genuine meaning over the next 365 days, but we are the only people who can know what that looks like.
Perhaps your family means everything to you, and you can resolve to call your mother more frequently. Or maybe you are feminist, and you want to spend 2022 reading Simone de Beauvoir. Maybe you value your mental health, and are willing to take small steps everyday to improve it.
No resolution is in itself too small, but it is a shame to waste a year chasing matters of small importance. The value of the resolution you make, should you choose to make one, is determined by the larger context of your self. With so many opportunities at your fingertips, and so little time spent young and alive, you must choose the right goals. How do you know which goals are right for you?
In his “domino theory of goal-setting,” psychologist Neil Farber suggests the answer lies in choosing goals fit to your personal values. He calls our values an “inexhaustible source of motivation and energy,” which help us “differentiate the important from the unimportant.” If we set hundreds of goals, with hundreds of different aims, it is no surprise that we struggle to accomplish them. Maybe the best New Year’s resolution is one that aligns with our deepest, core values. And if you do not know what that means, the best resolution may be to discover what it is you actually care about more than the rest.
Maddie Proctor ’25 (mproctor@college.harvard.edu) writes News for the Independent.