Nowadays, having a New Year’s resolution can seem almost quaint. Social-media influencers push self-improvement trends year-round: The spring has “glow up” challenges, as does the summer. Soon after, the high-discipline “Great Lock-In Challenge” and “Winter Arc” videos begin, many of them urging people to get ahead of the “new year, new me” crowd. Or you can attempt a slew of other self-betterment regimens, whenever the spirit calls. Many of these videos depict people minimizing distractions—such as, say, other people—to bicep-curl and matcha-drink their way to becoming “unrecognizable,” mentally and physically, as some YouTubers put it. At the same time, many Americans appear to be losing interest in New Year’s resolutions. One report from the social-media analytic company Brandwatch found that, in the days around January 1, mentions of resolutions fell 50 percent last holiday season when compared with the year prior. To put it plainly: Many people are now always trying to hustle their way to a better self, no matter the month or season.
In one sense, detaching goal setting from the start of the Gregorian calendar is reasonable—one can, of course, choose to begin afresh at any moment. But by letting New Year’s resolutions go, Americans may be losing something: a distinctly communal ritual that can remind people of how entangled their well-being is with that of others.
New Year’s hasn’t always been so associated with accomplishing personal goals. Humans have a long history of using the holiday to think about how to make life better for their community. Versions of resolutions have existed for about 4,000 years; in Babylonia and ancient Rome, people prayed together, paid off their debts, and made promises of good conduct to their gods. The rituals were usually framed as religious events supporting the broader group, and were tied to agricultural calendars. (“Permit my harvests, my grain, my vineyards, and my plantations to flourish,” some ancient Romans were counseled to ask of Janus, the god of transitions and beginnings, “and give good health and strength to me, my house, and my household.”) Even in the more recent past, in the United States, many people’s resolutions focused on learning how to live well with others. The most popular resolution in the U.S. in 1947 was, according to a Gallup poll, to “improve my disposition, be more understanding, control my temper.” Last year, by contrast, Americans’ resolutions were primarily related to exercise, health, or diet.
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Americans may no longer share a schedule dictated by the agricultural calendar, but a sense of community doesn’t need to disappear. New Year’s can be an opportunity to gather with loved ones and set resolutions together. Maybe everyone meets in person; maybe over Zoom. Maybe the group sets one big, collaborative goal—Let’s start a community garden, for instance, or Let’s take turns cooking meals for one another at home. Maybe everyone picks a different resolution, and the group brainstorms how to best help each person achieve it. And ideally, the goals aren’t self-serving—but considerate of the people around them.
Making a resolution with other people might actually be more effective than flying solo. Habits are unconscious patterns that can be hard to shake, and seeing someone in our environment engaging in a certain behavior can nudge us to do it too, Tim Kurz, a psychology professor at the University of Western Australia, told me. This permeability can have its downsides—your sister’s Is It Cake? binge-watching in the living room could cue you to watch even more Netflix. But it can also be a great boon: As work piles up, for example, you might forget about your resolution to check in on older family members. If you have set this intention as a household, though, you might see your partner buying groceries for their grandmother, which in turn might remind you to call grandma too.
Shared resolutions can support intention setting in another way: They may help people avoid what social psychologists call “do-gooder derogation”—a quirk of psychology in which humans tend to “find people who are more moralistic than us and are behaving more virtuously than us really annoying,” Kurz said. He gave me this example: Say you’ve recently resolved to ride your bike to work instead of driving, for environmental reasons. Your family, already buckled into the SUV, might feel their virtue threatened and decide to poke fun at you. Look at this guy! Have fun biking in the rain, Goody Two-shoes! If you set goals as a family, however, your relatives—who under other circumstances might be psychologically motivated to subvert your resolutions—may become more committed to helping you follow through.
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In the long run, resolutions that keep others in mind tend to have greater staying power. Studies have found that brute willpower alone lasts for only so long, and that people have a much harder time accessing willpower when stressed. This might help explain why a more individual New Year’s goal, such as losing 10 pounds by swearing off ice cream, may be more likely to fizzle. “If you fail in your quest, then the only person you have ‘let down’ is yourself,” Kurz said. Evolutionarily speaking, people might not even be built to set self-serving goals. What helped our human ancestors succeed were likely “strong social bonds,” the psychologist David Desteno wrote in a New York Times article about resolutions, “relationships that would encourage people to cooperate and lend support to one another.”
Of course, shared resolutions aren’t a magic pill for behavioral change. Humans can famously be both top-notch accountability partners and rampant enablers. When picking whom to make goals with, “be careful about who that person is,” Kurz told me. “You don’t want to strategically choose the person who you know is a total flake.” You might have resolved with your work bestie to quit overdoing the happy-hour piña coladas so that you can better participate in your team’s conversations; if your pal capsizes on your shared goal first, though, their decision could lead to a cycle of “collective rationalization,” in which you feel okay quitting too, Kurz told me. Hell, why not get another round?
Still, communal resolutions can serve as a good reminder of how profoundly interconnected humans are. And they can push people to widen their definition of self-improvement. In a recent interview, the Potawatomi botanist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer described the concept of “expanded self-interest”—the idea that the “self” can include all of life. “My well-being is the same as my family’s well-being,” she explained, and “my family’s well-being is the same as the well-being of the land that feeds us.” Bicep curls and matcha lattes, then, may get us only so far on the path to flourishing. The trick to helping ourselves might just be to focus on the communal first.
