New Years resolutions come round every year. Things that you want to achieve, things that you want to start, things that you want to stop. A lot of the time just like picking up the plates that fell off whilst you were so busy keeping the others spinning the years before.
It can be hard to distinguish just why we want to achieve the goals we set ourselves. I often find myself setting goals that I think will make me happier, but when I look more closely I realise just how much my “aspirations” are dictated by external factors rather being intrinsically motivated.
Am I really ready to buy a house, or am I feeling the pressure to because my friends own their own places?
Is running a marathon really that important to me this year?
I enjoy the odd cigarette. Do I really want to stop that this year? (Obviously this is an exception, and I’m doing alright so far)
With so much external influence from social media showing us the airbrushed and idealistic versions of people’s lives, social anxiety can be extremely potent and inhibiting on our ability to focus down on our own lives. Ultimately, the line between what we truly desire and what we believe we should be doing can become very blurred.
When considering this, I stumbled upon an article in The Guardian. The narrative of the article mainly centres around the feeling of happiness as a temporary notion, forever present in our lives but ultimately more absent than present, and how the pursuit of happiness is over lauded (read the article for a much more eloquent explanation).
This might sound a rather bleak outlook, but upon accepting this concept I think you begin to develop a broader perspective on what the author is referring to when he emphasises the importance of choosing meaningful experiences: there is nothing bad with wanting more, but rather than comparing our lives with other people often in totally different circumstances, it is much more progressive to compare yourself with who you were yesterday to achieve this.
The content also addresses the importance of not over-focusing on our goals, which can distract us from other opportunities that may appear for us in the peripherals. Illustrating this point, he refers to the results of the Invisible Gorilla experiment, whereby participants were so focused on counting the number of passes in a basketball game as instructed that half of them failed to notice a person in a gorilla costume when asked about it afterwards. I wonder how many people would notice someone giving out free money on a busy tube journey, where smart phones hold an iron grip over the attention of the majority of us?
An tunnel vision and reluctance to deviate from the path towards certain goals can be to the detriment of the beauty that can be found in our daily lives when we are not expecting it.
Happiness for me is an emotion often experienced retrospectively, and many of the moments that evoke the most happiness happened in these flashes where I wasn’t expecting it.
So this time round, I’ve attempted to assert myself towards challenges that I deem important to me but make sure to look up once in a while to appreciate the day to day as well.