You know the drill. At some point in the month of December you light a candle, crack open a fresh notebook, and suddenly you’re the CEO of Reinventing Yourself. You write “THIS IS MY YEAR” at the top of the page like a deranged LinkedIn post. You list your resolutions: wake up at 5am, no carbs, gym six days a week, dry January (again). You write: I want abs. I want money. I want a morning routine that looks good. 

You don’t just set goals; you design unobtainable quests. You promise yourself things you already know you won’t do: no bad days, no skipped workouts, no slip-ups, no texts to the wrong person ever again. You create a version of yourself that would require three assistants, a personal chef, a live-in therapist, and a second nervous system to maintain, and then you act surprised when you can’t keep up.

Deep down, you know you won’t hit half of these milestones. That’s the twisted comfort of it. If the bar is impossibly high, you never actually have to face what realistic effort would feel like. You don’t imagine your life feeling fuller, you’re imagining yourself looking better inside it. You get to sprint for ten days, burn out, crash, and then say, “See? I knew I was the problem.” And as hard as it is to hear… you are the problem. Just not in the way you think.

Somewhere along the way, resolutions stopped being intentions and became marketing materials. A personal rebrand. Most of our goals aren’t about becoming more alive, more connected, more generous. They’re about becoming more optimized. Less emotional. Less needy. Less… human. You sit down on December 31st and write a 12-month plan to make yourself easier to tolerate, for other people, but mostly for you. “I’ll lose weight so I’m finally worthy.” “I’ll work harder so I don’t feel behind.” “I’ll stop dating people who aren’t right for me, not because it will serve me, but so I can stop being embarrassed when I introduce them to people.” It sounds like self-improvement. It’s actually self-rejection with better fonts.

No wonder they fail. They were written to keep everyone else comfortable. You chose the admirable goal, not the necessary one. You chose the photogenic habit, not the life-changing one. You chose palatable. And palatable rarely changes a life. We dress resolutions up as public performances, announcements, mood boards, “hold me accountable” posts, but the truth is brutal and private: a real resolution is you telling yourself the truth and surviving it. It forces an audit. It exposes the gap between the life you tolerate and the life you’re capable of. And once you see that gap, you can’t unsee it.

If you’re going to change, you have to call laziness laziness, distraction distraction, and chronic accommodation what it is. Because here’s the uncomfortable truth you keep dodging: your resolutions are selfish. But they’re meant to be.

A real resolution does not ask for permission. It does not negotiate with your old habits. It does not crowd-source confidence in the group chat. It draws a line and says: “I’m no longer willing to be the reason my life stays small.” And yes, this will cost you. But again, it should. It will cost you the affection of anyone who loved you most when you were available for everything and committed to nothing. It will cost you the identity built around being “nice,” “chill,” “down for whatever,” when whatever has been draining you for years. It will cost you the flimsy thrill of being invited, recognized, praised by people who do not have to live inside your life after they clap.

Here’s the even colder truth: you are already losing. When you let your phone eat your mornings, you don’t just lose an hour of scrolling; you lose the version of you who might have written something, moved your body, sat in silence long enough to hear your own thoughts. By noon, your mind has been picked clean by other people’s opinions, promotions, panic, and highlight reels. You’re already exhausted from a life you haven’t even participated in yet. 

When you say yes to every “maybe,” you don’t just end up at plans you don’t want to be at. You slowly dissolve your ability to trust yourself. Every time you override that tiny inner “no,” you teach your body that its signals are negotiable. That your time is communal property. That your comfort is optional. The muscle for “no” doesn’t disappear overnight; it atrophies, one polite yes at a time, until you’re living a life curated more by other people’s expectations than your own desires.

And when you contort yourself to be more lovable, smaller, quieter, less “dramatic,” more “chill,” you don’t become easier to love. You become easier to tolerate. There’s a difference. You start editing your opinions, softening your edges, laughing off your needs, all to earn a kind of affection that’s conditional on you staying edited. But the only thing anyone ever truly loves, deeply and sustainably, is a person who is actually there. Not a performance. Not a projection. Not a well-behaved version of you. You lose the only thing anyone can truly connect to: yourself.

So this year, choose your losses. Choose the ones that give you back your life.

Repeat after me. This year I will disappoint the right people on purpose. This year I will stop narrating my future in the language of doubt. This year I will keep the small promises, the ones no one sees, until my self-respect becomes undeniable. This year I will trade intensity for consistency. Every. Single. Time. I will stop mistaking a 10-day obsession for real change and start honoring the boring, unsexy repetition that actually rewires my life. This year I will stop performing exhaustion as if it proves my importance. This year I will not make myself easier to love by becoming less of myself.

Your resolutions are selfish. But they’re meant to be. Not selfish in the “I don’t care about anyone else” way, selfish in the “I finally care about my one, wild, finite life” way. Selfish enough to protect your time. Selfish enough to honor your limits. Selfish enough to choose a life that feels good from the inside, even if it looks confusing from the outside. If your resolutions don’t cost you old versions of yourself, they’re not resolutions. They’re decoration.

At the end of the day, we’re lonely. We’re tired. We’re overstimulated. And we’re terrible at saying, “I need change, and I’ll be the one to change it.” So we outsource it to the calendar. We hope January works like magic. We hope a new week will erase an old pattern. We hope momentum arrives as a feeling. But it won’t. Momentum arrives as repetition. Until next time x