Against resolutions

Suleika Jaouad on ritual, repetition, and the fantasy of starting over

Painting by Milton Avery, shared by Rose Florence

Editor’s note: As a new year dawns, Suleika Jaouad reflects on why New Year’s resolutions so often fail, and what might take their place.

The other day, I asked a friend what she wanted to let go of from this year. “Everything,” she said. “Complete self-erasure.” We laughed—at the absurdity of it, and at the thin, uncomfortable filament of truth running through the joke. How often we look back on a year with a prosecutorial eye, tallying what we didn’t finish, the habits we couldn’t break, the person we failed to become. By January, many of us are already exhausted by ourselves, and by the prospect of having to fix ourselves yet again.

I, too, have a tendency toward extremity. Over the years, I’ve subjected myself to all manner of New Year’s overhauls: I will seize the day. I will wake up at dawn to meditate. I will write 1,000 words by lunch. I will swear off sugar, start wearing sunscreen religiously, go to the gym three times a week, and never again sleep with my phone in my bedroom. By this time next year, I will have written a book and emerged calmer and fitter. Also morally superior. These resolutions were often launched simultaneously, as if sheer volume might improve my chances of seeing them through. I always began with zeal. I always burned out.

This all-or-nothing thinking is not a bug of resolutions; it’s the design. Resolutions are outcome-driven and binary: success or failure, repair or ruin. They rely on force and control to produce change. Unsurprisingly, they don’t work very well. Research suggests that most resolutions fail within a month—which means many of us spend the first weeks of the year not renewed but, at best, quietly chastened. At worst, like a complete and total failure.

When I was 24, I made a New Year’s resolution to run a half-marathon while in treatment for leukemia.

The logic, in my mind, was impeccable. A cancer survivor I’d read about in a magazine—a former professional athlete and reality TV star—had run the New York City Marathon shortly before entering the hospital for a second bone marrow transplant. He was a mythic figure in the cancer community, a cancer-lebrity, if you will. I thought, I want to be like him. I was two years into treatment, and unrecognizable to myself. I’d once planned to become a war correspondent, a life defined by motion and urgency; instead, I had spent the years since graduation in hospital rooms, watching my peers accelerate into adulthood.

I wanted the hero’s-journey arc I’d been promised: to emerge from the worst year of my life stronger, braver, somehow better for it. And so I did the sort of swift, deeply flawed math desperation excels at: he’d had two transplants and run 26 miles. I’d had one transplant, so surely I could manage 13.

I believed, naively, that I could simply decide I’m going to do this and that would be enough. What I failed to consider were several small but relevant facts. I was not a former professional athlete. I had never done any distance running. I had not even managed to complete the mandatory mile in high school gym class. I was still receiving maintenance chemotherapy and spending a good deal of my time horizontal.

None of this registered as disqualifying. As I saw it, I had done the only thing that mattered: I had resolved to do it, therefore it was to be. I had just survived a bone marrow transplant, had I not? I had been told, repeatedly, that I was so strong. Somewhere in this reasoning, I began to believe I might be even more prepared than the most determined of healthy marathon runners—confusing declaration with destiny, and wanting very badly for the two to be the same thing.

I jumped in with both feet. I registered for a benefit race, emailed friends and family asking for donations toward my fundraising goal, and signed up for a gym membership I could barely afford. I put a pair of fancy running shoes and a full set of thermal running gear on my credit card. When I put the whole outfit on and went out for my first jog, I asked my mom to take a photo—fist raised triumphantly—which I promptly posted. Announcing it publicly meant there was no way out.

I began to run-walk a single mile. Physically unprepared as I was, it might as well have been the half-marathon itself. I finished limpingly, wrecked with exhaustion. The next day, I hobbled around, wincing with every step. That weekend, I ended up in the emergency room with a hairline fracture in my foot.

My body had filed a formal complaint. The race was off. Case closed.

I look back now on the whole ordeal as comically doomed from the start. At the time, it felt intimate—not just a failed resolution, but an indictment of my capacity for change. For a brief moment, the plan had lifted me out of myself. I had something to train for, something that made the future feel legible again. When it collapsed almost immediately, it didn’t just knock me back to where I’d started. It confirmed my worst fear: that wanting change was itself a liability, another way to set myself up for disappointment.

Eventually, I stopped making resolutions altogether. Not because I stopped wanting change—but because I stopped trying to become someone else. The desire to work on myself never went away. It simply lost its appetite for spectacle. And so, in place of resolutions, I turned toward ritual.

Rituals are gentler than resolutions. Where resolutions chase outcomes, rituals attend to process. Georgia O’Keeffe took a 30-minute walk each morning in the desert, often alone, believing the walking itself was where the work of painting began. Toni Morrison rose at 5, made her coffee, and waited for the sun to appear—or, as she put it, “watched the light come.” Ludwig van Beethoven, also a devotee of coffee, approached the ritual differently, counting out exactly 60 beans for each cup, the number he believed produced the perfect brew. None of this was about efficiency or output. It was about creating the conditions in which the work—and the self doing it—could come into being.

Rather than control, rituals are relational. They create atmosphere. They offer rhythm and containment. Where resolutions depend on willpower—a finite resource, especially in times of illness or uncertainty—rituals build scaffolding. They don’t ask us to muscle through. They anchor us in time, place, and meaning. Rituals are not impressive. That, I’ve come to believe, is one of their chief virtues. They don’t demand overnight transformation. They ask only that we return—to the canvas or the page, to the body, to ourselves—and see what shows up.

Over time, my rituals have taken many forms, some encompassing a day or a week, others a season. Whenever I reach the point in a workday where my brain begins to feel like a baked potato—soft, inert—I turn, every time, to the same 15-minute guided breathwork to reset. Over the summer, my first cup of coffee became a ritual: sitting in the hammock, cup in hand, no phone, no music, just five minutes in my own company before the day made its demands. During the pandemic, some friends and I ended each day with what we optimistically called “cold plunging”—skinny-dipping in a nearby swimming hole—until winter arrived and the water iced over, restoring our common sense.

Alongside these, I turn to another ritual that has shaped my life in subtler, more durable ways: a 30-day journaling project at the start of each year. Not forever. Not flawlessly. No page requirement, no rules, no obligation to sound wise or write well. Sometimes it’s three pages; sometimes it’s a single sentence or a closed-eye drawing of a giraffe. The only instruction is to show up, to take the lapses in stride, to keep going.

One of my great teachers in this manner of working is the designer and educator Michael Bierut, who originated what became known as the 100-Day Project. He didn’t create it as a challenge or a dare. It arose organically in the aftermath of September 11, when he, like many New Yorkers, felt unmoored. Each day for a year, he chose a single image from the newspaper and used it as the basis for a drawing—sometimes lingering on it for hours, other days finishing in a few strokes. “The practice had less to do with the output and more with getting myself in the proper frame of mind,” he told me. Later he refashioned this ritual for a graduate course and invited his students to do one small creative act that they could repeat for 100 days.

People often imagine such projects as feats of endurance, as something to white-knuckle their way through. He never thought of it like that. “If I’d woken up on January 1 facing the sheer cliff of a year’s worth of drawings, I probably would have gone back to bed,” he said. “I just thought, Why don’t I do this today? And then I did it again the next day.”

That’s how rituals work. They steady us. They open us up to possibility without demanding performance. They keep us from the all-or-nothing thinking—from what Michael Bierut described as the sensation of walking a tightrope, peril increasing with each step until you freeze, convinced you’ll never make it across.

That’s what ritual gives me now. Not a guarantee, not an outcome, not a transformation on a deadline, but a means of staying in motion without hardening, to keep my balance without gripping so tightly. In the pages of my journal, I can exist as my messiest, most unedited self. Within the simple container of 30 days, structure makes room for play.

There is no grand reinvention here—only the patient work of showing up, again and again, nudging myself millimeter by millimeter toward the person I’m becoming.