It is January 1st, and I still haven't decided on what my goals for 2024 are going to be. There are some meta outcomes I want to improve, and I think that in order to do so, I am going to have to consider what I am willing to lose. As I have been speaking about recently, I have come to the idea that the reason that so many of us fail at resolutions (and goals in general), is because the outcomes are good, but there is no direct cost to getting them. No "sunk cost".
For example, if there is the goal of quitting smoking, the outcomes are expected to be good, but the "loss" is the cigarette, which isn't a bad thing. If however the only time someone smoked was out with friends on the weekend, the cost could be "to stop going out with friends on the weekend until comfortably quit". Depending on the person, this might be a two to six month period.
Willing to commit?
Many aren't. We want the good outcomes, but we don't necessarily want to build the environment that improves chances of success, because that takes effort, and there are generally costs involved. And, because the outcome is good, while there is no gain to failure, there is also no downside - it is just staying at the status quo.
Breaking this down for myself on one of my own goals, we can look at some of the costs. For example, I would like to improve my fitness in 2024, and the main thing would be to lose some weight around my midsection. I don't need to have a sixpack (I have never had one, even when I was under 10% body fat), but I also don't like how it feels now, even though there isn't that much extra. The biggest issue I have is diet related, not exercise, but most of the time I eat relatively healthily, and this points toward where there might be a cost.
I don't sleep that much.
I am up late, s it is the only time I really have to myself during the day that I can take care of all the various digital things that I take care of. I don't mind not sleeping that much and I enjoy the time to spend on my own thoughts. But what ends up happening is that I end up snacking after everyone has gone to bed, and my snacks tend to have a fair amount of energy in them, even if I am just eating nuts. So, while everyone is sleeping soundly, I am packing energy into my body and then going to bed, where I don't need it.
So, what I am going to try to do to mitigate the risks is two things:
Snack differently
I am still likely to eat, but instead of eating quite as late as I do, I am going to have a (hopefully healthy) snack earlier in the evening. This way, it will start to digest more before bed. However, I will also be quite hungry, a feeling that I should get used to again.
Go to bed earlier
As a night owl who really enjoys the time in the evenings, this is the real cost to changing my snacking behavior, because I don't sleep well if I go to bed too early. Even if I head at midnight, the majority of the time I will be up again an hour or two later, unable to sleep until 5 or 6 am, leaving me wrecked during the following day. But, I am going to look to start on a schedule, where three nights a week I will go to bed before midnight. This will also mean I will miss writing a post or two a week, which is another cost, as writing is the way I process my world these days. I am not sure if the gains of improving my snacking behavior in this way, will offset the loss of writing for me.
However, general fitness is a keystone habit, meaning that it affects other aspects of life. Exercise in general is a keystone habit, where the people who exercise regularly, even if they don't like to do so, will see benefits in other areas. They tend to feel better physically and emotionally, but also tend to look after other aspects of their lives, including the way they organize their time, their level of motivation and their relationships with others.
Another thing that I want to do is "improve relationships" in my life, as I believe that our relationships with each other are probably the only thing that are important to our existence. I feel that there is very little purpose in a life lived alone, and it is just taking up space. Having good relationships with people means that we have to look at other aspects that may risk those relationships, which requires expanding our views and considerations to include threats, whether it be through culture, or the environment, now and into the future.
Especially since the stroke, I have let a lot of my relationships degrade, as I just haven't the energy to keep chasing. Chasing, because especially after Covid, people in general have let their relationships degrade, as they closed themselves off to the world out of fear and convenience. I still talk to a lot of people through my work, but I would like to build up my reference group again, to make my circle more valuable to me, and for the group as a whole.
My approach to this is to schedule:
Three calls a week to different friends
It seems silly, but I want to ensure that I am actually making an effort to call, not just drop a message here and there. While face to face is better ,there is also a lot more value in spoken communication than written, with more intimacy in sharing each other's voices. It also means that there will likely be more focus in the discussion, with less distraction.
One face to face social engagement
Each week, I am going to try and meet someone directly, who isn't a colleague or a client for a coffee, or to go to the gym, or to do something that isn't work related. I used to be quite social, but have let this slide over the last years, especially in the last three. I would like to include my wife in some of these engagements, but that isn't an imperative.
The cost to this change is that it is going to take more of my "free time" away from me, which I value, even though I don't really have free time per se. But, more than that, it is going to make me incredibly uncomfortable, because I just don't carry the same confidence in myself as I did earlier. I think that while the motivation is non existent since the stroke, another reason I have lost contact with most of my friends is that I don't feel like the same person, I don't feel I can hold my own as I used to. I feel like I can't add as much value to their lives. I feel far more useless. Not only this, it is much harder for me to stay focused during conversations now, so digital life has provided the opportunity to hide away, to avoid dealing with facing some of the impacts of the stroke.
Convenience is attractive, but destructive.
These aren't "New Year Resolutions" I guess, but I am hoping that rather than improving a narrow area, they will have an impact on a broader set and structure of my life. I haven't settled on these or just these yet, but I do believe that whatever I do focus on this year, will be centered around health and relationships, with the goal at the end of the year being a generally higher quality of life, where I feel more engaged and connected to the world.
For too long, the cost of my behaviors have been degrading the things that I actually value for the long term, because I have been favoring the needs of the short, as I try to establish a base for the future to build upon. I am not there yet, but I do feel that now is a good point to start the pendulum swinging back in the other way, and start to build what the rest of my life might look like.
For the next few weeks, I will refine my thoughts on these and start making some moves to see if they will be viable or not. What I do think is that unless we move with intention, and that intention has some level of thought behind it, we are unlikely to move very far along the path of life. That might be fine for many people, but it is not what I consider a purposeful life, and might lack some quality of experience.
It is far more convenient to be irresolute.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
