A Better Way to Make New Year’s Resolutions

Early in 2023, my colleague Caroline Mimbs Nyce chatted with the writer Oliver Burkeman about New Year’s resolutions. Burkeman is an expert on productivity, but he’s arguably also an expert on getting real about the time human beings have on Earth. Burkeman is the author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mere Mortals (4,000 weeks is approximately the length of an average American’s life span). In it, he writes: “The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short.”

With this in mind, Caroline asked Burkeman: “Do you think New Year’s resolutions are worth making, considering we’re all going to die, as your book posits so bluntly?”

Burkeman has hope for the concept of the resolution. “Confronting how short our lives are, and how limited our time is, is actually a sort of precondition for doing meaningful things, including making personal changes,” he told Caroline. But how we go about making these changes matter, he noted; there are healthy and unhealthy ways to do so. In today’s reading list, our writers walk you through the history of the New Year’s resolution, how brands take advantage of it, and how to use it for your own growth.

On Resolutions

Making a New Year’s Resolution? Don’t Go to War With Yourself.

By Caroline Mimbs Nyce

“The difference between not doing anything at all and doing 10 minutes a few times a week is absolute.”

It’s the Most Inadequate Time of the Year

By Amanda Mull

New Year’s resolutions are the perfect opportunity for consumer brands to remind you about all the ways you could be better.

New Year’s Resolutions That Will Actually Lead to Happiness

By Arthur C. Brooks

Set goals to improve your well-being—not your wallet or your waistline.

Still Curious?

Other Diversions

P.S.

Here’s one resolution you can make tomorrow: Don’t go out on New Year’s Eve. It’s not worth it, my colleague Julie Beck wrote in 2018.

— Isabel