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This Year, Resolve to Do Less
New year, same you, same world filled with problems. Take it easy, why don’t you?
When the pandemic began, many people took to the internet to share all the things they hoped they’d accomplish in isolation.
“I’m going to write a memoir!” one friend of mine announced.
“I’ll finally have time to work out every day!” another declared.
“Look at all this bread I baked!” said several others.
Across the internet, some people even turned their goal-setting into a cudgel with which to beat others: “I read four books this week and practiced my Spanish every day,” they tweeted. “What’s your excuse?”
When in a state of shock, it’s pretty common to retreat into work. Lonesome and powerless, many of us frantically grasped for a sense of purpose and agency. And in our moralistic culture where suffering is equated with virtue, it’s no wonder a lot of folks wanted to cast a horrifying situation as somehow “worth it.”
In those early days, I fell into a work wormhole, too — developing workshops for newly online teachers, churning out essays about how quarantine might affect each of us psychologically, organizing political calls to action. I wanted to work my way out of despair.
And then, a few months in, I lost the will and drive to go on. Throughout most of the summer, I was a nervous wreck, typing furiously on my laptop outside in the sun, but deleting just as much as I wrote. I put together a vague, unfocused book proposal that I cringe to read now. I over-organized, over-committed, and over-Zoomed, getting nothing out of any of it. I was a cranky little anxiety-goblin until I finally, finally let myself just lie down and cry for a few days.
Now, as the new year settles upon us, I see people once again desperately chasing dreams of productivity and accomplishment. They are resolving to lose their “quarantine weight,” or organize their pantries using clear, labeled containers. They’re opening up novel drafts, redownloading Codecademy, and dusting off graduate school applications.
I understand where this impulse comes from. We all want to believe that we’ve really turned a corner, that the whole sordid affair…
