Why I resolve to ignore the psychologists Let's dream of exuberant reinvention

According to received psychological wisdom these days, New Year’s resolutions should be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. It is an entertaining yardstick with which to gauge the success of January ambitions throughout the ages. Take Samuel Pepys’ oath on 31 December, 1661 to abstain from “plays and wine”: specific, measurable, and highly relevant to his wife’s empty purse, but unfortunately unbounded by any timeframe. And nor did it prove achievable, given Pepys’s nature and the temptations of Restoration London. He was at a play the very next day, and back on the wine a few weeks later.

Just as unrealistic were Samuel Johnson’s 1769 hopes of rising by eight in the morning, a self-command plaintively repeated many times over 50  years of diary entries, without much success. Woody Guthrie’s  “New Year’s Rulins”, written down in 1943, were a mixed bag: “change bed clothes often” and “listen to radio a lot” sound eminently SMART, but “help win war — beat fascism” less so. Meghan Markle’s resolution a decade ago to “let the magic know that there is an open door policy with me in 2016 and that it is always welcome to join the party”: time-bound, certainly, but neither specific nor measurable. But then again, she did land a prince that year, so what do the psychologists know?

What the SMARTies miss is that turning an essentially optimistic ritual into a piece of efficient project management is a depressingly cowed way to kick off the year. If we are forced to view them in psychological terms, New Years’ resolutions are better framed as a socially sanctioned form of Borderline Personality Disorder. For a few weeks in the depths of winter, there is collective permission to dream of personal reinvention in the most exuberant and improbable of ways. Or as G.K. Chesterton observed, equally unheeding of the SMART imperative: “The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes.”

Never mind your unspoken conviction that you are bound to fail in your self-improvements sooner or later. Right now, you are in a generous imaginative realm where anything is possible. You are listening for bells, and letting the old year out through the back door. You are first-footing the homes of your friends while carrying propitious gifts. During this mysterious interlude, full of icy dark and ghosts, why not dare to dream of miraculous transformations too?

All this technocratic talk about New Year’s resolutions misses the point because it doesn’t fully grasp what they are. In making one, you are not offering a sober prediction about the conduct of your future self, based on available evidence. If questioned, many fervent annual resolvers would predict that they are bound to default eventually, but still place stern notes to selves on the fridge in the meantime.

Unlike with prediction, your will is involved. You are forming an intention, and it can only come from you. For this same reason, Zoe Williams’s half-serious suggestion in The Guardian last year, that we start choosing resolutions for our friends instead of ourselves, is a non-starter. An intention has to relate to your own perceptions of what is valuable in life, not theirs.

Intentions are weird mental entities, and philosophers struggle to pin them down. They are different from mere beliefs, because of that presence of the will. But they also seem different from desires, because you can long for something you have no intention of trying to get. In order to properly count as having an intention, some philosophers think you must display commitment, having already started to make preliminary steps towards your goal. Others disagree: it can be the kind of “pure” mental state you can have while sitting around doing nothing whatsoever. New Year’s resolutions look like they fit the latter model better than the former, and not just because of all that turkey. Had you embarked upon realising your goals already, they wouldn’t have the requisite dramatic promise of a fresh start.

Accordingly, you should ignore any so-called experts ludicrously exhorting you to “soft launch” New Year’s resolutions in September, on the grounds that this will be more effective. Such pedestrian minds are apparently blind to the awe-filled sensation of standing between two huge temporal edifices in the dark. You are shedding the old self with the old year, and plunging headlong into the new on both counts. In September, telling yourself you are going to start running five miles every day is mundane. On 1 January, it becomes a magical incantation.

So: thanks to its symbolic context, a New Year’s resolution isn’t just any old intention. This context also explains why it has a kind of solemn import that the everyday version lacks. The felt gravity is hard to explain otherwise. You might say that it is because you have made a promise to yourself, but self-promises are the easiest kind to break. You might say it is because you have told others about your resolutions, in order to “hold yourself accountable”. But even if you have, it is unclear why others should care either way. Your projects are not theirs, and vice versa.

Perhaps to overcome this difficulty, an article in this week’s Atlantic suggested that New Year’s resolutions be agreed collectively with family or friend groups, the better to avoid future backsliding. Once again, possibilities of thrilling self-transformation are made to sound more like completing a group presentation at work. A better story is surely more Nietzschean. It is a crucial part of the January fantasy that your body and soul will be forged into some new and miraculous shape, simply by the force of your own will.

For delicate souls, this might sound disturbingly oppressive. Indeed, to explain the difference between an everyday intention and a resolution, some philosophers picture the latter as a piece of self-imposed legislation. Alain de Botton has said that “we need resolutions for the same reason as we need laws, to keep ourselves in check”. Meanwhile, Richard Holton pictures resolutions as involving intimidating meta-intentions. When you make a resolution, behind your ordinary pusillanimous intention to do such-and-such in future stands another intention, armed with a metaphorical cattle prod, there to stop you giving into temptation to break the first.

Since some people don’t like being told what to do, even by themselves, it is presumably these kinds of legalistic or military conceptions that give rise to endless variants of the “Why my resolution is to give up on New Year’s resolutions” article from Guardian authors. Others worry that resolutions are bad for mental health, apparently defining “feeling disappointed in yourself” as a form of mental illness. The good news is that you are likely to get over this sort of illness very quickly — and that as long as you are alive, there will be further New Years to try again.

For this is surely the best side of the annual ritual of resolutions, properly understood. They are not just an expression of what you want to do, but of who you want to be. They are an intrepid acknowledgement that you are capable of being a better person, couched not in the bitter language of self-recrimination but of hope. Whether they actually lead to a slimmer waistline or more efficient working habits is neither here nor there. The point is that, right now, you can almost believe they will.

And the new year serves a further function: of allowing you to leave certain things behind. As with rituals of confession and forgiveness, you now have a formalised opportunity to mentally cast off the past and start again. Without religion we have precious few occasions dedicated to symbolic renewal, and certainly no collective ones. Our vernacular may be full of punishing talk about public “accountability”, but says little that is useful about meaningful repentance. This means it can be very unclear when repentance may legitimately end, and how exactly one is supposed to move on. Here, perhaps, we really do need something time-bound. In lieu of a priest, a calendar can help.

None of this immense value can be described in the language of “measurable” or “achievable” outcomes. Indeed, it can barely be described in words at all, without flat-footed literalism stamping the life out of it. Those who are keen to dismantle the institution of New Year’s resolutions are taking away more than a bit of February self-recrimination. Who wants time, boringly viewed as an undifferentiated plane? Who wants human life seen as a monotonous toil, with no small deaths along the way nor invigorating rebirths?

As for me: in 2026, I resolve to be more loving to my family, more attentive in my friendships, more fastidious in my habits. My January will be the driest on record. My language and my kitchen will both be impeccably clean. I will go walking in nature every day, laugh in the face of thunderstorms, and leap hills effortlessly. My columns will soar like an eagle, float like a butterfly, and sting like a bee. I will finally finish reading The Brothers Karamazov. In Russian. And if I can help it, I will mostly be staying away from the psychological professions. Their disenchantment can be horribly catching.

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