#13: The resolution game

In a hundred years, we'll all be perfect. Provided we keep our New Year's resolutions.

The science of self-bettering is on fire. Once yearly, we all pay homage to its craft.

Everyone has their own nostrum for formulating the optimal New Year’s resolution — share it, don’t share it, download some app, write it on your mirror — but I won’t be going into any of those strategies in this post. It’s the second week of January, your feed is probably dyed with good advice.

Instead, I want to explore a particular argument against New Year’s resolutions with which, as a former anti-resolutionist, I am all too familiar. I want to sketch it out, to learn where it comes from, and to show why it’s the worst kind of argument: the kind that, by engaging with it at all — agreeing, disagreeing — we completely miss the point.

The argument goes something like this: Nothing in the physical world, no Kepler’s Law concerning bodies in orbit, distinguishes New Year’s Day from any other day on the calendar; therefore, if you have a particular wish for your future, you might as well fix it today rather than waiting until January 1.

It frames itself as a kind of mindfulness, but the argument conceals an insidious workhorse quality. Making a resolution admits that, for a couple of seconds in December, you lapsed in your directive to constantly self-improve. I found anti-resolutionist think pieces mostly in startup/hustle culture corners, for reasons that will become clear.

You could counter that holidays are all meaningless, but the power of collective belief bestows them with meaning. Even that falls flat for me: Transitional periods have an inherent meaning. We track hours and days, not just years (“I’ll go to the store at two,” “I’ll do chores on Sunday”). It’s less a tradition and more of an impulse. We keep time out of necessity — calendars themselves aren’t mutations of liberal excess or whatever.

Just like we don’t promise to meet up for coffee either “RIGHT NOW” or “somewhere in the mists of the future,” transitional periods create opportunities for us to make and keep promises with ourselves. Tomorrow will never arrive. Two o’clock, and Sunday, and January 1 will.

That’s half the equation, but almost as important as the content of the argument is the form it usually takes: You’re sitting around a few days or a few minutes before the clock ticks over, and nine out of ten people explain their resolutions. Then one person says, “Well, actually…” and the whole process grinds to a halt. To the anti-resolutionist, resolutions aren’t just unhelpful. They’re anathema.

The problem is, if you subscribe to the idea that resolutions are about self-improvement — if the goal is to optimize for success, as every single New Year’s resolution blog reminds us — then this is the only sentiment that makes sense.

In other words, we’re cursed with the psychology of achievement. We know how to succeed now in ways we didn’t know before. The top resolutions of 1947 included “live a better life” and “be more religious.” These are bad resolutions. There is nothing to track, no number to watch rise and fall.

Those who labor over their resolutions think achievement should be measured on a calendar. Anti-resolutionists believe it should be measured off-calendar. Where they agree is that measuring achievements is the key to self-improvement. The result: a strategy that seeks achievement through numbers. In a word, gamification.

A gamified system asks us to translate our hopes into a set of victory conditions, like we saw with fear-of-death mechanics. For that, we turn to quantification. Hitting those target numbers gives us a rush, but may just as well depress us when we fail, or when we succeed wildly only to find ourselves no better off. When you play the resolution game, you can win and still be unhappy.

The process of taking something complicated and quantifying it for pleasure is called “value capture,” coined by philosopher C. Thi Nguyen¹, who studies games and gamification extensively. Value capture asks us to flatten our values, which are usually floaty and ambiguous, into something easily measurable.

Take US News & World Report’s law school rankings as an example.² For a long time, top law schools each had their own mission statements that told applicants what they valued — media law, community engagement, criminal justice, etc. Then, a central body started publicly ranking the schools by quantified metrics like LSAT scores and employment rates. To avoid grappling with their own floaty values, students followed the rankings. That tendency was reflected in admission numbers. For the institutions, there was much to be gained from playing the game. They flattened their values, and devastated the legal profession.

This is the danger of gamification, and it’s a danger that we encounter when we pin our sense of self-improvement on New Year’s resolutions. We’re tempted to flatten our happiness down to something eminently achievable. Moreover, we flatten our happiness into something corporations can recognize. Planet Fitness, BetterHelp — probably you’ve already been inundated with their holiday ad campaigns.

So we’re encouraged to optimize our resolutions for success, but doing so endangers our values. And, hey, I make my resolutions this way, too. I can’t just ignore the research that tells me how to set myself up for success. I want to succeed. If I punt, I’m no better than the anti-resolutionist who grinds New Year’s to a halt. I need to mean it. But how do we play the resolution game without compromising our values?

The answer, I think, involves peacocks.

It’s an old story, one of the most popular myths about New Year’s resolutions. Once upon a time, knights would round out Christmas by placing their hand on a roasted peacock and rededicating themselves to the tenants of chivalry. The ritual was public, taken at one of the last and largest feasts of the year.

We know now that this isn’t a true origin story, just another transition ritual. Still, I think the peacock vow captures the spirit of the New Year’s resolution: a public rededication to one’s values.

To recover from the value capture of optimized resolutions, we first need to identify our real values. Why are you setting a step goal? Are you trying to get hot? Live longer? Appreciate the outdoors?

By sacrificing a quantifiable goal, we gain the ability to judge for ourselves whether a particular metric is actually serving our joy. Sometimes that means deciding that we’ve appreciated the outdoors without having any evidence to back that claim.

So that’s step one, unflattening our values and living with ambiguity. But we still need to play the resolution game, and we still need to give it our all. It’s just, we can’t play the game and expect it to make us happy. The point of the game is not our own happiness.

In a poem on the peacock vow, Letitia Elizabeth Landon calls the present “the working-day portion of life’s wondrous whole,” redeemed by “the fame of the future.” I don’t think we can, or even should, live entirely in the present. There has to come a time when we look forward. When we do, it should be with hope and purpose.

This is the spirit of the resolution game, the resolution ritual: to convince each other that change for the better is possible. Potential energy is a hard thing to see, especially by the end of the year when so much of life feels like one of those money booth games. We resolve with one another to make that energy visible.

Set a step goal. Mean it, track it, post it, smash it, fail it. Who knows how you’ll feel next month, but by then the resolution will have done its job. The baton came your way, and you charged it and sent it along. Resolutions are a team sport.

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Thanks for reading!

Supernormal isn’t… Well, it isn’t a business. Where it lives has never really mattered to me, except that Substack is easy to use and writers I like were already using it. But it also has a weird stance on Nazis, along with some other weirdness with discoverability.

One my resolutions this year is to leave Substack. The thing is, we’re at a size where I can probably just spend an afternoon porting over the Supernormal catalog and email list into another platform. I don’t anticipate the experience will change at all. Maybe just the footer. But since I know some of y’all are also writers of less-than-a-year-old Substacks, I’ll let you know where I move and why, so you can join me if you want.

Anyway, I’ll still be here writing until further notice. Happy 2024! Oh, post your resolutions below — I don’t know if this came across, but I am a huge fan of resolutions.

DR

1. We met C. Thi Nguyen in “#3: Video game writing.”

2. Nguyen takes this example by way of Engines of Anxiety by Michael Sauder and Wendy Nelson Espeland.