Resolving Not To Resolve Not To Make New Year’s Resolutions

There is no escape from neoliberalism.

I hate New Year’s resolutions. Every year, on the year, we’re all supposed to turn ourselves into self-maximizing middle-managers of our own bodies/souls, sternly ordering our employee/selves to eat less, exercise more, work harder, drink more moderately, and generally fix whatever needs fixing to ensure a lifetime of health, wealth, and happiness. The division between 2024 and 2025 is supposed to enact a division in your identity, turning you from hapless slacker id into the ruthless capitalist superego who demands that that slacker id that is you stops slacking and gets down to the hard gig work of self-actualization.

This is irritating enough. But it’s even worse when you are already that capitalist superego and already that gig worker. As a freelance writer, I get up every day and remind myself that I suck and need to hustle more, because if I don’t get on the hamster wheel, no ham will be forthcoming. The remorseless round of guilt, failure, and self-reprimand is built into freelancing; every day, in every way, is a new New Year’s resolution, as you get up with the knowledge that you need to do better today than yesterday if you want to pay your bills, feed the cats, and grind towards ever receding retirement. To be a freelancer is to be at once the employee failing and the employer sneering at the failure and urging more effort with the cattle prod. “Resolutions” are the capitalist tools you use to turn yourself into the capitalist tool that chews up self-flagellation and self-disgust and farts out college tuition payments, so your child can have the credentials they need to spend their life doing the same wretched thing.

Given that bleak remit, I am tempted to remove my nose from the grindstone momentarily so I can climb atop the soapbox and shout down at all of you, “Stop with the resolutions already! Enough feeling guilty for not going to the gym! You should feel guilty instead for feeling guilty for not going to the gym! Resolvers of the world stop resolving! You have nothing to lose but a stupid New Year’s ritual!”

The problem, though, is that resolving not to resolve is still a resolution. More proscriptions are just more proscriptions, and more guilt is just more guilt. Telling people to feel bad about New Year’s resolutions so that they can free themselves of capitalism and neoliberalism is just another voice demanding that we all self-optimize/live our best life/manage our inner employees better. Demanding of yourself that your self be a better anticapitalist widget just isn’t that different from demanding that your self be a better capitalist widget. You’re still trapped in the inexorable logic of self-help gig work, trying to solve society’s problems by turning inward and fiddling with the dials in the hope that some combination of settings will make you happy, and/or win you the lotto.

So this is not a screed demanding that you cease with the New Year’s resolutions. It’s not a screed telling you to make New Year’s resolutions either. It’s a screed mostly directed at myself, reminding myself that my resolutions to make or not make resolutions are largely irrelevant as long as we’ve created a big, complicated social structure where endless resolutions are both part of my job and virtually guaranteed to lead, not to prosperity and happiness, but just to more resolutions.

The New Year resolution is an assertion of, or a hope for, self-control. It’s also an assertion that self-control and self-remaking can be transformative. But for me—and I suspect for many people—self-control and self-remaking is not a transformation. It’s the boring, grinding default. On New Year’s day, as on every day, you’re the little capitalist in your own skull demanding that you exploit yourself and squeeze out that value, so you can do the same thing tomorrow. I resolved to take a vacation and not work again until January 2, but here I am writing this on the night of the 1^st. Another resolution failed. Hello 2025.

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