Stop it.
Stop drinking.
Start starving.
No smartphone after 6.
No smartphone after midnight.
Write one thousand glorious words every morning before dawn.
By the end of next year, you’ll be a sober, skinny, well-rested literary luminary, and— fuck it. Technically, the holiday ends on Monday, anyway. Have another cookie.
I wrote a version of this essay at the beginning of 2025. I’m glad I didn’t know then that 2025 would be one of the hardest years of my life.
Everything here is true, and there’s more.
Ever wonder why you drink a second glass of champagne when you know it’ll give you a headache in the morning? Here’s why. And here’s why the bowl of chips at the Mexican restaurant is irresistible, even though much lived experience says if you don’t sit on your hands, you’ll be too stuffed to touch the food you ordered. Why you stay home in your pajamas instead of going to the dinner party that you know will be energizing and fun.
Temporal discounting is what behavioral scientists call the human tendency to avoid momentary discomfort or choose immediate gratification over long-term rewards. It’s a big deal in the field of behavioral economics. Why is it so hard to make the choices we know will make us happy in the future?
UCLA social psychologist Hal Hershfield and his team first used fMRI scans to document neural patterns in subjects. They asked participants to picture themselves today. Next, they were asked to imagine their future selves and then other people. It turns out that across the board, the patterns evoked when subjects thought about their future selves were most similar to those evoked when thinking about strangers.
Pause for a moment for some mental time travel: conjure an image of yourself twenty years older. How do you feel about this person? Endearment, or maybe benign empathy, or possibly a little fear and loathing? In Hershfield’s two-part experiment, the subjects with the largest neural differentiation between their present and future selves were also most likely, in the second part of the experiment, to forfeit future benefits in favor of a small, instant financial reward. If your future self is a stranger, why make sacrifices for their benefit?
No wonder New Year’s resolutions tend to fail. Daily self-abnegation in the service of some random stranger from the future is a big ask. No matter how much you want to lose twenty pounds and learn Japanese (and would like to have these things for the You of today), your brain is not wired for this struggle. So the earnest good intentions of December 31st morph into self-loathing by MLK Day. It’s that you’re lazy; you’re just wired that way.
Kierkegaard famously said that life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards. We are always traveling forward into the unknown, always becoming. But what if we put a pin in our imagined future and try to rappel our way back to the now?
In a 2024 study, Hershfield and colleagues discovered that the vast majority of their subjects naturally favored mental time travel in a single direction, from present to future, rather than the other way around. Next, the researchers asked them to envision their future selves, then travel backward to the present. As lab studies demonstrated, when time-traveling backward, participants perceived less distance between their present selves and future selves. They also behaved with stronger intention and follow-through in corresponding experiments testing their savings behavior.
Let’s see if it works. I challenge you to make a resolution this year, something small but meaningful for your future self. Next, conjure that future self in your mind’s eye. Not the gray-templed twenty-year version, but the near-future version from early February, who is reaping the early fruits of whatever it is you’ve chosen to do.
I used to avoid New Year’s resolutions for all the reasons above, especially because I didn’t want to set myself up for defeat at such a dreary and vulnerable time of year.
Last year I wrote:
But now I love, love, love resolutions. To me, they feel like a delicious surprise from the future. I start getting excited for them by the end of November, long before I’ve given a thought to holiday gifts or plans. In recent years, I’ve used resolutions to test out new ideas, gain self-knowledge, and make both small and enormous positive changes in my own life.
After all that, did I keep my last year’s resolutions? “The Writer is King.” Nope. When my life took an unexpected turn mid-year, I found myself in an existential scramble. I wrote, but I could not produce public-facing writing. What kept me alive, literally, was my learned ability to recognize that I had an obligation towards future-Me. I’m grateful to the Me of the past, that stranger who is part of me, for taking the time to understand that past, present, future, we are all the same One.
Be kind to your past self. She created this life for you, the good and bad, with whatever tools she had. You have some new tools now. Cultivate your love of future-You and the rest of your one precious life. Somewhere on earth (maybe this place, here), it is always tomorrow.
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