New Year's resolutions about more than resolve: Deakin researcher

Dr Patrick Stokes, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, says whether the goal is to stop smoking, lose weight, learn a new language, spend more time with friends and family, or find more ‘me’ time, New Year’s resolutions are part of how we make sense of our past by relating it to an imagined future that reflects our agency.

“You could say New Year’s resolutions are really about narrative control. They’re about trying to turn your life from a bunch of stuff that more or less just happens, into a structured and coherent whole, a story in which you’re both hero and narrator. That’s understandable and, in some ways, even necessary,” Dr Stokes said.

“The problem is, as philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre noted, the moment you make a resolution you’re confronted by the fact that you’re free to break it. The very freedom that makes the idea of resolutions possible is also what thwarts them.

“But even if you’ve ended up breaking them all by February – and we all do – resolutions at least help to give you an idea of what you care about and what you see as being within your power and responsibility.”

Dr Stokes suggested that when it came to selecting a New Year’s resolution, it paid to be realistic and incorporate small goals or milestones along the way to the future self we hope to become.

“If you break large goals into little chunks, you get to have a little moment of victory when you’ve achieved each smaller goal,” Dr Stokes said.

“It also helps if you can tell a story about how you might get from one place to another. If your goal is just to 'get fit,' for example, break that down into little milestones – I'll be doing ten laps by February, twenty laps by April, etc. – rather than just comparing yourself to an end-goal.

“This kind of storytelling and focus on intermediate stages might help to make the whole thing a little more manageable and a little more comprehensible rather than simply trying to identify with some distant future state.”

According to Dr Stokes, aiming for smaller changes rather than a complete overhaul of one’s life is the way to go.

“I think for the most part, really big transformative changes are not all that possible for people because at some point that becomes almost identity-destroying,” Dr Stokes said. 

“It almost evolves into the desire to be a completely different person and that becomes almost incoherent. Smaller changes make a bit more sense as they have some purchase on you as you are now rather than being this radically different envisioned state. 

“In terms of identifying with your future self, it’s probably easier if that future self is not too different from the self you are now.”