You've made new resolutions for 2018 and the first one is not to make resolutions.  Instead, you're going to "set goals."

Goals will help by keeping you organized and allowing you to share your progress on social media, a little gloating does wonders for self-motivation.  Once your goals are in place, it might be smart to design a methodology that will encourage you to accomplish them.

But soon enough February comes, mind winter doldrums will set in, and you'll start to slide.

Self-help advice tends to reflect the beliefs and priorities of the era that spawns it.  People Dream big, and, in a day of easy money, find that their dreams could come true.  In our current era of non-stop technological innovation, fuzzy wishful thinking has yielded to the hard doctrine of personal optimization.

It's no longer enough to imagine our way to a better state of body or mind.  We must now chart our progress.  Where success can be measured with increasing accuracy, so too, can failure: the other side of self-improvement.

The desire to achieve and to demonstrate perfection is not Simply stressful; it can also be fatal.

Finally, there's the economy in the hyper-competitive, globalized economy, where workers have fewer protections and are more disposable that ever, requires that we try to become faster, smarter, and more creative.

If the ideal of the optimized self isn't simply a fad, or even a preference, but an economic necessity, how can any of us choose to live otherwise?

Source: "RESOLUTIONS" by Alexandra Schwatz in THE NEW YORKER, January 15, 2018.