About ten years ago, my sister and I were sitting in a restaurant at about this time of year, contemplating the fact that while each of us was basically very happy with our life, both of us felt that there was room for improvement. We decided to make New Year's resolutions together, resolutions that would not be a list of aspirational gestures but a serious attempt to consider our lives as a whole and deploy what intellectual resources we could muster on the question: what concrete steps, deliberately taken, would cause them to improve? What ruts were we in, and how could we get out of them? What interesting new habits of mind would be likely to do us good, and what, exactly, could we do to develop them? Each of us came up with rather long lists of steps to take, and every year since then I have had a list of something like thirty resolutions which I undertake.
Some of my resolutions are specific to a given year; they are commitments to myself to do something specific that I might otherwise never get around to. (Next year, for instance, will finally be the year that I redo my front walkway, and also the year in which I figure out how to get my state rep. to introduce legislation banning the private ownership of primates in Maryland.) Some of them are the usual (exercise and the like), though I tend to try to make them more specific than that (e.g., exercise a certain number of days a week.) Some of them involve trying not to lose skills that might otherwise atrophy: living alone, for instance, it takes a resolution to get me to seriously cook once a week, rather than relying on the excellent prepared food at my local market. Some involve things I would otherwise wish I did more of: I usually resolve to go out and see some form of art at least once a month, since otherwise, my life being what it is, this might fall through the cracks.
But many of them are, as I said, attempts to figure out how to instill in myself habits of mind that I want to have. And since there are a few of these that have, over the years, been really good, I thought I'd share a couple. (Note: if anyone finds them useful, I should say that most of the credit for these goes to my sister.)
First: every year I resolve to do something new every day. It is, of course, important to be clear on what counts as a new thing. When my sister and I first made this resolution, it made for amusing comparisons between our circles of friends. The philosophers I know tended to think that this was trivial: just count things like, 'I drew breath on Jan. 1 2005' as a new thing, and you're set forever. My sister's friends, by contrast, tended to think of 'new things' as 'huge new things', like going to Antarctica, and wondered how she could possibly have made such an enormous resolution. But we take a middle ground: 'new things' include, for instance, taking a new way home, trying a new flavor of soda, and the like.
The point of this resolution is just to make sure that whenever I am not in some situation in which novelty comes naturally (e.g., in another country), I am on the lookout for ways of doing things that I have not done before, and that when I have a choice between something I've done before and something I haven't, I'm less likely to go with the familiar. Because I have this resolution (and because it does lead to moments when I think, oh no, it's 8:30 p.m. and I have not done a new thing, groan), I tend to keep my eye out for ways of satisfying it, and thus I am always asking myself: is there some different way of doing this? Some other thing I might try? Which buildings on campus have I not yet set foot in? Which kinds of cheese have I never tried? Which neighborhoods in my city are completely unknown to me? Why not try this different bike path? And so forth. And this makes my life better, both by introducing all sorts of new things into it (some of the cheeses I will never try again, but some were wonderful discoveries), and by instilling a particular cast of mind that I value.
Another resolution: I will do some unnecessary good thing every week. 'Unnecessary' is not the right word here; what it means is, basically, a good thing that I would not have done without this resolution. Helping out my friends and my students, giving money to tsunami relief, and so forth, are all things I would do anyways. The point of this resolution, as with the previous one, is to get me to be on the lookout for other good things I might not have noticed, and might not otherwise have done. They don't have to be particularly large or striking -- before I found out that it was illegal, I used to count putting coins in all the expired parking meters -- but they must exist. And while it's OK to have a few fallbacks (for me: driving off to some park where the trash is never picked up, and filling up a bag of trash), I try to think of new ones. Again, it's both the actual deeds and the cast of mind that I value. (And without this resolution, I would not have a clear idea of which parks are not regularly maintained -- hint, in the inner city -- and this sort of concrete knowledge of the place I live in also matters to me.)
I suppose one might regard this as an oblique reply to Sebastian's last post: it's hard to divide the world into people who want to try to achieve some particular goal and people who believe in dynamism once you realize that dynamism is among the things you might try to achieve through technocratic means (which I think is an unattractive, but probably accurate, way of describing what I do with New Year's resolutions). Unless you restrict the goals of technocrats to absolutely static states of affairs, like my living in my current house forever, or my having exactly one car, you can't rule out such attempts; and if you can't, I think the distinction collapses.
But be that as it may, resolutions have made my life a lot better. And while most of the people who learn that I have somewhere around thirty resolutions regard this as evidence of some hitherto unsuspected totally anal streak, I just think it's fun.
Next year, for instance, will finally be the year that I redo my front walkway, and also the year in which I figure out how to get my state rep. to introduce legislation banning the private ownership of primates in Maryland
There has got to be some sort of story here.
Oh, and welcome back!
Posted by: von | December 30, 2004 at 10:43 AM
Thanks -- it's good to be back. The holidays were great, and I got to, well, encounter my little brother's first unborn child for the first time. Then the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division meetings, which combine the fun of seeing people I like with such things as interviewing fellowship candidates (they were quite nice, but interviewing in general is not my favorite activity), and giving a talk (stress!), and the fact that the Eastern Meetings are the job market meeting in philosophy, which means that the atmospherics are set by a mass of hungry and stressed-out job candidates and an equally large mass of tired interviewers, and so a pall of gloom and desperation hangs over the whole affair. Ugh. Plus, every time I go, which means every year, I get to relive my own job market experience, which I would rather forget.
Primates: no story at all, actually. I think about the moral status of animals, and how we should treat them, in the course of my work, and when I discovered that it's perfectly legal to buy a chimp in Maryland, I was appalled. And I have this odd idea that the world would be a better place if everyone who discovered some part of the law that could be better, even if it's a relatively tiny part, actually tried to improve it.
Posted by: hilzoy | December 30, 2004 at 11:12 AM
hilzoy, please do me a favor, and when you're ready to tackle that issue, email me. My wife runs a website in her spare time that deals with animal protection issues -- it has a very large readership and has even had a little real-world influence on these kinds of things, and I'd like to put the two of you in touch.
Posted by: Phil | December 30, 2004 at 11:15 AM
Phil -- sure. I was thinking of posting on it later, after I read von's comments. But it will have to wait until after I get back from going to see a Varied Thrush that has turned up in PA, which I have been waiting and waiting for the free time to go visit (it appeared a few weeks ago, and it's still there -- unlike the Gray Kingbird, which usually spends the summer in Florida and winters even further south, which popped up in PA at around the same time, but has since vanished, probably because it is not at all equipped to deal with the cold.)
Posted by: hilzoy | December 30, 2004 at 11:22 AM
Unfortunately it is legal to buy exotic animals in many states. I tithe monthly to several animal refuges that specialize in abused or neglected lions, tigers, bears and elephants. where did humans ever get the idea that we are an intelligent form of life?
Posted by: lily | December 30, 2004 at 11:38 AM
"hitherto unsuspected"??
And welcome back!
Posted by: Anarch | December 30, 2004 at 12:38 PM
Anarch: hitherto unsuspected because it doesn't exist. Only enormous effort keeps me from being the most disorganized person in the entire world.
Posted by: hilzoy | December 30, 2004 at 07:26 PM
hilzoy, do you have a secret you can share with us as to how you get yourself to live up to your resolutions? The only self-improvement projects that have worked for me have involved the active involvement of an enforcer to make sure I don't slack off, and the areas of improvement for which such an enforcer is available to me are a tiny subset of all those that I'd like to pursue.
Posted by: kenB | December 31, 2004 at 12:51 AM
Well, the "trick" I use is to make most of them fun, and all of them specific. I mean: if you get into it a little, both of the ones I mentioned are actually fun, at any rate if (like me) you have a streak that says: I refuse to concede that I can't think of SOMETHING new/good to do.
The other trick (for self-improvement ones) comes from rather lengthy experiments with using bets to write my dissertation. (Lengthy because various arrangements kept not working because the person I made bets with and I kept letting each other off the hook.) We realized that if we bet each other that we would write, say, 15 pages a week, or even 5, we would find ourselves saying: but I had nothing to say. Often it was, or seemed, true. Finally we hit on the right trick: you have to stipulate at the outset that you can write 5 pages of anything, including the alphabet over and over if necessary. That way it cannot be true that you "can't" do it. And since we gave our pages to one another, shame precluded our actually using the alphabet instead of actual prose.
The analog for NY resolutions is: (minor coercion) make what you have to do to keep it very small, and be too ashamed to actually count walking to the end of your driveway and back as "exercise" (for instance.) Major coercion: same as above, plus tell someone what you're doing, make them ask you what you've done every week, set up a penalty if you don't keep your now-embarrassingly-easy resolution, and make it really clear that they have to exact the penalty and are doing you no favors at all if they don't. (I have never yet had to use major coercion, but I think it would work, if you had a suitably remorseless friend.)
Posted by: hilzoy | December 31, 2004 at 01:11 AM
Anarch: hitherto unsuspected because it doesn't exist. Only enormous effort keeps me from being the most disorganized person in the entire world.
The fact that you make this effort leads to me to believe my suspicions were correct ;)
Posted by: Anarch | December 31, 2004 at 12:21 PM
(Lengthy because various arrangements kept not working because the person I made bets with and I kept letting each other off the hook.)
Heh, this is what always happens with my wife and me. My only success in recent years (running 25 miles per week) is due to having a friend at work who took my offhand "hey, I should go running with you sometime" comment and wouldn't let it go. For a year he needed to wield the whip and not listen to any of my silly excuses, until finally I internalized the discipline.
If only I had a friend like that around when I was writing my dissertation -- I would've finished a couple years sooner and I might still be in academia. Hmmm, maybe it's just as well.
Anyway, thanks for the tips. You've inspired me to give the resolution thing another try.
Posted by: kenB | December 31, 2004 at 01:34 PM