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Quit on new year goals? It’s okay
Summary
Why not make imperfectionism your buzzword for 2025 instead of falling into the impossible trap of fresh-startism?
If you have made it this far in the new year without slipping up on your resolutions, then well done! According to any number of studies, you are an elite member of a rapidly declining club of people who are still going strong with their quest for self-improvement in 2025. In contrast, the rest of us are regretting our newly acquired expensive gym memberships and reaching out for a glass of wine more times a week than we solemnly promised ourselves just a few weeks back.
Depending on the research you read, between 1 in 10 to nearly half of the world’s population gives up on grand plans to reinvent themselves by the second week of January each year. Yet, the temptation to become the “best version of yourself", as new-age motivational gurus urge us, is hard to resist. It’s human nature to live in thrall to the myth of “fresh-startism", as Oliver Burkeman, a journalist-turned-writer of popular philosophical books, put it last year in a dispatch of his email newsletter, The Imperfectionist.
The term is ironic as well as filled with bathos, a reference to the impossibility of getting rid of the detritus of the past, no matter how desperate we are to make a clean break. Squeaky clean goals are as absurd as swearing to never let the thought of your ex ever cross your mind as you move into a new relationship. Or to wake up one fine day and give up caffeine, only to beat yourself up into a ball of misery for going cold turkey.
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Instead of the false assurance of “a new year, new you", Burkeman urges us to face the facts, with calmness and self-compassion. Let’s face it, it is hard to shed the “old you" even though the morale of entering a new year may be high for some. There will be days when all three rings of your Apple watch won’t close in spite of your strict regimen. Which doesn’t mean it’s all doom and gloom from here till eternity—or that there is no merit in trying to improve our lot in life.
In his acclaimed book Four Thousand Weeks (2022), Burkeman offers a sobering antidote to the debilitating streak of perfectionism and hyper-productivity that keeps 21st-century humans spinning on a hamster wheel. As the title suggests, the aim of his book is to help the reader accept and reorient their relationship with time, an exercise that must begin with a fundamental reckoning with the ridiculous shortness of human life.
If you were to live till 80, Burkeman says, you will have roughly 4,000 weeks on earth. In the cosmic scale, that’s less than the blink of an eye, over even before it’s barely registered. So it seems somewhat absurd to wrestle with such a terrifyingly short span of time, constantly trying to harness it with apps and tools, and always falling woefully short, in spite of our best efforts.
The trouble is, as Burkeman explains, that this situation may not even be clear to our limited scale of perception. “The problem isn’t that we are not managing time well enough," he writes, “The problem is that we’re trying to do too much with the time we have."
While some of his advice on overcoming this tendency to do too much may be familiar (such as replacing to-do lists with ‘I-did’ ones), Burkeman is particularly sharp as well as poignant when exploring the mindset that keep us trapped in self-defeating habits.
The 21st-century malady of “busyness" is a case in point. “Busyness is a form of laziness," Burkeman writes, “lazy thinking and indiscriminate action." If there is more than a hint of censoriousness in his tone, it’s because he is always Exhibit A in his book—an Everyman who is as susceptible to the follies of time management as any of his fellow humans. Throughout Four Thousand Weeks, indeed in all his books (his latest being Meditations for Mortals), Burkeman speaks with the friendly voice of an elder cousin who has been through the rough and tumble of life, and has more gentle advice to offer than confident answers to give.
The rebuke on busyness, for instance, gets to the heart of the problem with human perception of time. Unaware of the big picture (the shockingly paltry 4,000 weeks, or less, that are allotted to us), we try to pack in as much as possible into our lives, relying on zillion systems of productivity to make us demigods of efficiency. And yet, “the paradox of time management is that by trying to do more, we end up doing less," Burkeman writes, “because we fail to focus on the one thing that actually matters."
This elusive “one thing" doesn’t exist in one fixed form. For each of us, what truly matters is unique to who we are and the choices we make. Some of us want to be the best parent we can be; others want to shine as professionals. The bog standard productivity bandwagon fails to recognise these subtle calibrations in the things we desire from our short lives, instead, driving us towards quantity over quality, propelled by the fear of missing out. And so, constant busyness turns into a tool to validate our self-worth, a measure of the value of the time we spend on earth.
At the heart of Burkeman’s book is a critique of this tendency to evaluate everything we do today in terms of the benefits it is going to reap in the future. The ludicrousness of this approach becomes evident the moment we accept the sheer unknowability of the future and, by extension, the uncertainty that is forever inherent in the very act of planning.
From the burgeoning industry of self-help books to motivational speakers to parenting manuals, the tentacles of capitalist growth keep us wrapped in rewards, goals and targets.
If you bring up your child by following certain principles today, you are told, you are setting up the foundation for a balanced, successful adult. Burkeman counters this line of thinking by alerting us to the cost of losing touch from the tangible present, the moment we are living in, by excessively focusing on the benefits of a future that may or may not come to pass.
Not everything in life needs to be a ROI. Productivity is overrated. Embrace the imperfection. “The fact that life is short is not a tragedy," as Burkeman puts it, “it’s the reason we have to make it meaningful."
Rereadings is a monthly column on backlisted books that have much to offer in contemporary times
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