The one resolution few people will set in 2025
Counter cultural? Yes. Essential? Also yes.
I intended to share this in December when we all feel the consequences of our busyness most acutely. The irony of having zero mental capacity to do so isn’t lost on me.
Alas, here it is, a few weeks late but arguably right on time? When better to consider our time and resources than the immaculate first few weeks of a new year as we make lofty goals and set our schedules? December’s exhaustion may have been softened by weeks of sunshine and leisurely days but, as I heard a radio host broadcast yesterday “only 50 more weeks till next summer holidays and a few days till the next long weekend”.
For those who don’t wish to white-knuckle through 2025, hanging on for long weekends and holidays, allow me to propose another way.
If we assigned viral internet jokes to months of the year, December would be the plain text meme that reads: “Adulthood is saying, ‘But after this week things will slow down a bit’ over and over until you die”.
The joke is relatable in January and July, September and November, yet December is when we collectively blame our exhaustion on summer and Christmas rather than, say, an addiction to stimulation and productivity.
December when I regularly text my husband to complain about how tired I am. But will I cancel a social event or go to bed early? Absolutely not. It’s warm and light and I’ll be damned if I won’t be out enjoying it, even if it requires a Stanley cup of black coffee.
However, I’ve been thinking about capacity long before the silly season because, if we’re honest, the pace of life has been exhausting all year. December is simply the month we allow ourselves to openly commiserate about it and dare to express a desire for something different.
Welcome to the era of achievement
This cyclic habit of over-stacking and then complaining is one I become especially weary of this summer, largely because our desire for slowness is one we have every ability to fulfil1. At work drinks and weekend brunches, we stand around and protest how utterly shattered we are, despite the fact we are at an event we willingly attended (or instigated) of our own volition.
Our obvious dislike for busyness yet total inability to change it makes little sense until one considers our cultural context; one the 21st-century philosopher Byung-Chul Han describes as an “achievement society”.
“Twenty-first-century society is no longer a disciplinary society, but rather an achievement society,”, Han writes in his 2010 novel, The Burnout Society, describing the move from an era of prohibition and commandments to initiatives and motivation.
We may feel freer than those from the era of prohibition and commandments, Han writes, but we’re still beholden – just to a “destructive compulsion” to endlessly outdo ourselves. The answer to “am I worthy” is no longer, “am I good/pure/Godly” but “am I efficient, innovating, productive”.
Journalist Rina Raphael writes similarly in her 2022 book The Gospel of Wellness. Whether it’s legacy media or social media, if you pay attention “you will notice a hustle culture that dictates you should always be doing something even when that something should potentially be nothing,” Raphael writes.
“We just can’t stop indulging our inner high-achiever. The productivity mandate stares down on you in every aspect of your life, requiring you to be more mindful with your kids, get more fit, or become more Zen.”
In this context, it’s no surprise that our physical and mental limitations look less like features of humanity but flaws; ones we must ignore or outsmart. Anything to avoid the idea that, perhaps, we can’t do everything we want to do, or feel we must to be “enough”.
Even writing this feels like a betrayal of myself, a lazy abandonment of potential. Even if one intellectually grasps the logic of limitations (and regularly experiences their existence) it still feels like an excuse given by someone who doesn’t want it enough, whatever “it” is.
In more generous moments, however, I’m drawn to examine where my idea of limitlessness or unending capacity comes from – be it capitalism, media, or other cultural institutions – and who really benefits from these ideas.
Where hustle narratives hide
Narratives about potential and efficiency are especially obvious in proudly ambitious industries or pockets of culture that pride themselves on the hustle. These are the business tycoons, self-help influencers, life coaches, or CEO authors all preaching (a word I use intentionally) the ideology that you can “unlock” the ability to do more, have more, and be more if you simply know the secret.
Every inspiring figure has a different secret, but all imply your limitations or capacity are imagined and can be tricked or gamed with the right morning routine, mantra, or course. Some are hilarious in their extremity.
It’s a corner of society that seems ridiculous to me and my friends, who regularly quote one outrageous interview with an entrepreneur who claims to fit 3 days worth of productivity into one.
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Less obvious, and far more alluring to someone like myself, is how this manifests within the wellness industry, which claims to align with nature (and thus, one’s body), yet rather than outsmarting the body’s capacity, seeks to pathologise it.
A recent New York Times article illustrates this perfectly. Titled “Why Am I So Tired All the Time?” the article answers a reader who said they got adequate sleep but were fatigued. I read on, assuming the author would offer a holistic selection of possible causes. Instead, they remained firmly within the realm of medical maladies, discussing insomnia and sleep apnoea, hormonal imbalances and vitamin deficiencies.
As someone who has long experienced insomnia and anaemia, I’m a big advocate for booking a GP visit when feeling run down. What is cause for question, rather, is when we are convinced these symptoms of burnout are always a sign our body needs a ‘solution’ rather than our calendars or expectations.
While business industries offer morning routines to ‘unlock potential’ or other tactics to grittily ‘push through’, the wellness industry invites us to get texted for SIBO, Lyme or mould and remove toxins from our diet and skincare. We’re told to cold plunge in the morning and jump on a trampoline to regulate our nervous system (yes, really), take an armful of supplements, and sleep with mouth tape. Optimise! Optimise! Optimise!
Rarely are we told we may be exhausted simply because of an unsustainable pace of life. We’re told to add more techniques and approaches to deal with fatigue or burnout rather than take an inventory of our time and consider whether we’re tired because we weren’t designed to have unceasing reserves of energy.
Of course, one can ignore their capacity and wait for their body to call time. There will be repeat sicknesses, an achy lower back, blurry insomnia, or knotty shoulders – stress manifested in a body that has been pushed too much without reprieve, forcing us to stop, to slow (then wonder why on earth we feel so crap).
“The imperative to achieve,” Han writes, “is the new commandment of late modern labour society and quite literally makes us sick”.
It’s these symptoms that ease and soften during precious periods of prolonged simplicity – summer weeks by the seaside or a long weekend in the forest. Periods of self-enforced nothingness that always feel both deeply good and a little anxious as I detox from my diary of non-stop activities.
If it’s not a sickness that slows us down, it’s that familiar feeling of having nothing left to give. Hitting the brick wall. Personally, it’s a feeling often experienced near the end of the week, on a Friday or Sunday, when I look at an event scheduled just days ago with dread. Not because of a lack of desire (I’m often the instigator of said plans) but a sudden absence of physical or social energy.
At these moments, cancelling always prompts both an anxious stab of guilt and visceral relief. When the latter wins, I text an apology and revel in the luxury of an unexpected free night but always with a trace of disappointment; no one likes a flake.
I performed the emotionally taxing dance of scheduling and flaking and rescheduling for years, largely because the truth is humbling and rather unpopular; my availability doesn’t guarantee my capacity.
We may have seven evenings each week but that doesn’t mean we have the social or physical energy to fill them with activities, regardless of how enjoyable they are. Each person’s capacity is different and mercurial but the fact is we all have one.
If you find yourself regularly bemoaning how exhausted you are or consistently rescheduling or dreading plans as I did, it’s a sure sign you’re hitting up against yours.
The beauty of Margin
If society teaches us to rest when we “need” it, when we're at the end of our threadbare rope, the solution to our constant exhaustion is the opposite; to rest before we need it; a concept commonly called “margin”.
“The conditions of modern-day living devour margin,” wrote physician-researcher and educator Richard Swenson in his 1992 book Margin. According to Swenson, society’s emotional and spiritual unhappiness stems from chronic overload caused by an idolisation of progress; a fact that is only more true than when it was published.
“At some point, people have a decision to make,” Swenson said during an interview in 2016. “You’re going to get to 138% [of capacity] and crash and burn. That’s what’s going to happen, or you’re going to pull back and go to the underside… to 90%, 85%, or 70% and breathe for a while.”
This isn’t an excuse to be lazy, Swenson clarifies. “We are supposed to have effort that we show, but we don’t have to keep up with this herd that is heading toward a cliff.”
Margin is an anticipatory easing off the accelerator, a pre-planned space you (and this part is crucial) do not then fill with other forms of productivity or optimisation, be it “life admin” or “self-care”.
A well-known version of margin is the Sabbath; a day Jewish and Christians cease from work (job work, housework, working out) and devote their time to rest and delight.
In my own life, margin is ensuring at least one weeknight each week is totally free. On “margin night” I don’t have dinners or drinks, long workouts or tasks on my mental “to-do list”. It’s a night to make a leisurely dinner and take a long walk, settle down with a book or take an “everything” shower.
Daily margin is resisting the urge to stack events back-to-back, which often results in leaving someone or something early, torpedoing across town and arriving full of cortisol and late. One inspiring friend masters this, rarely committing to two social events in any morning or night. If she does, she’ll add a one to two-hour buffer, which seems overly cautious until you realise it’s how she stays so supernaturally calm.
It’s being conservative with your “yes” and generous with your “no” for social events, or media consumption, plans or New Year resolutions. Always knowing, it’s much easier to add these things back in, rather than cancel them.
The challenge of being easeful
It’s counter-cultural to acknowledge one’s capacity and humbling to admit it may be smaller than you would like (or have been told is “normal”).
If you’ve been socialised into equating worthiness with productivity and overload, the stillness and slowness margin (even a night of it) will feel confronting, boring, lazy. It certainly won’t feel relaxing or peaceful.
Raphael reveals a term for this exact feeling when one can’t fully relax due to the pressure to be productive; Sunday Neurosis.
“Believed to have been coined by Hungarian psychoanalyst (and friend of Freud) Sándor Ferenczi, it refers to the anxiety we feel when we attempt to be idle instead of, say, training for a marathon. It's the restlessness that comes with being free of structure, duty, and work. Freedom might just feel like emptiness. Or guilt.”
Don’t mistake me; a life spent cultivating relationships and pursuing projects is deeply satisfying not to mention bloody fun. We all have a fundamental hunger to create and relate. But to borrow a phrase from toxicology, “The dose makes the poison”. It’s less what we’re doing but rather the amount we pile onto our plates, and why we feel the pressure to.
If you’re always hanging out for Friday, collapsing into long weekends or dreaming of a rest that is inexplicably reserved for holidays, it’s worth asking what is flawed; our bodies or the expectations we thrust upon them.
“Most people are just start normalising the pain that they have and they see all around them, but it’s not normal. What we have today is not normal,” Swenson writes.
During a time often reserved for resolutions and goals, the simple yet challenging question is this; has your body been asking for more margin in 2024 and are you brave enough to grant it in 2025?
Sure, there are non-negotiable obligations to our family, ourselves and our jobs but it’s the many “shoulds” and “want tos” we stack on to these that I refer to.