Episode 10 - Are New Year’s Resolutions Worth It?
Transcript
Ellie: 0:07
Hi, I'm Ellie Anderson,
David: 0:09
And I'm David Peña-Guzmán. Welcome to Overthink.
Ellie: 0:12
The podcast where two friends,
David: 0:14
who who are also professors,
Ellie: 0:16
put philosophy in dialogue with the everyday.
David: 0:18
Because big ideas are within everyone's reach. Ellie, 2020 has been a heck of a year.
Ellie: 0:33
Yeah, you're telling me.
David: 0:36
And now we're heading into the New Year. And I recently read an article about how millennials are the most likely of generations to make New Year's resolutions. And so I'm wondering whether you've made any resolutions this year and if so, what they are.
Ellie: 0:52
I have not yet made my resolutions because I always do so on exactly December 31st, but I will have some resolutions. I make some every year and they're usually pretty broad picture, like focus on work more, look at phone less, et cetera. But one that I really want to implement this year is less dual-screen time. If I'm watching TV, why am I also scrolling my phone? It's not even fun.
David: 1:20
Oh, my God, you are one of those violators.
Ellie: 1:24
Yes! Well, but this is the thing. I usually only do it when I'm alone or when I'm with my mom. Sorry, mom. But I watch a lot of TV and movies by myself and I'm just scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. I've grappled with trying not to look at my phone first thing in the morning. I'm usually reading the news from bed with my phone two inches from my face because I have such terrible eyesight and I haven't even put my contacts in at that point. I've grappled with whether I want to let that one go, but it feels like going cold turkey would be pretty difficult. So I think I'm going to let it slide for now. Maybe I'll reduce the time that I spend.
David: 2:01
Are they all about technology?
Ellie: 2:03
Oh God, no, no, no.
David: 2:04
Okay, give me a more juicy one. I don't care about your phone habits!
Ellie: 2:09
Well, I don't know. I don't know what you mean by juicy. What about you? What are your New Year's resolutions?
David: 2:14
I have none. I have very strong feelings against the very institution of New Year's resolutions. I've never made any. And so I just moved from December 31st to January 1st as if it was just any other day, which it is.
Ellie: 2:32
It's such a delightful opportunity for a special ritual to cap things off.
David: 2:37
Yeah, but I have a lot of problems with the content and the form of the ritual. And I hope we talk about that, because I have nothing but disdain for New resolutions.
Ellie: 2:48
I like em. Today we're talking about New Year's resolutions. Why do we make resolutions at all? Or at least, why do I? David obviously doesn't. And why at the end of the year?
David: 3:01
What do these resolutions say about how we view, and how we relate to, ourselves as subjects?
Ellie: 3:08
The term New Year's resolution first appeared in a Boston newspaper article from 1813, an article called "The Friday Lecture." But New Year's resolutions have been around for much longer, even if we weren't using the term as such. So for instance, in ancient Babylon, over 4,000 years ago, citizens would make promises to the gods during the festival Akitu. And if they broke these promises, the gods would not look upon them favorably. A similar tradition is found in ancient Rome, starting in the year 46 with the launch of the new calendar. Ancient Romans would make sacrifices to the god Janus, that famous two-headed god who's both looking back and looking forward, and make promises for the year ahead.
David: 3:54
So historically new year's resolutions have a clearly spiritual and religious dimension. Originally, they take the form of a promise. However, in the 18th and 19th centuries, there is a slight shift, and they change from being essentially promissory notes to being expiatory, meaning that instead of looking to the future, in order to garner the favor of the gods, they look backwards. And so you make a New Year's resolution so as to expiate or to cleanse the sins that you've committed during the year. So it's like paying your dues through the gods rather than making a promise about what's to come.
Ellie: 4:34
And that's so interesting because I think a lot of times in the present day, people are using New Year's resolutions as a way to start with a clean slate after a really debaucherous December, probably not debaucherous this December, right, during quarantine, but in the past, you know, it's like eating a lot of food, drinking a lot of wine, partying a lot, et cetera.
David: 4:54
Yeah. And the way in which people use them today, maybe, it is as a new beginning, but again, in the 18th and 19th centuries, they have this sense of forgiveness. They are understood as paying a price for infractions committed and they take the form almost of a pilgrimage. A few years ago, Emma Green wrote an article in the Atlantic arguing that in the 20th century, uh, New Year's resolutions became secularized. And they become much less about spiritual concerns, about religious infractions, about washing away sins, and they become much more about personal development, about the body, about finances, which is essentially what New Year's resolutions are to the present.
Ellie: 5:37
Yeah, I mean if you think about some of the common New Year's resolutions that people have, they're things like be healthier, exercise more, save more money, quit smoking, get organized. And those are not overtly religious or moral; they're rather about a kind of formation of the self, which I think is only intelligible in the context of the legacy of Christian confession that we have in the US but still, you know, they're not like obviously promises to the gods. They're promises to ourselves as Gods, perhaps.
David: 6:11
Exactly. And that's one of the things that I really dislike about New Year's resolutions, is that they've lost this broader spiritual dimension that is about really changing your core values and beliefs, or to bring about an alignment, to make you a better person. Nowadays, everybody just resolves to be, y'know, rich, thin, and fuckable. So like I have a problem with the content of the kinds of resolutions that we make today. It's the same tired cliched resolutions that get regurgitated again and again, by different people, in different circumstances.
Ellie: 6:47
And on top of the content of New Year's resolutions, it's very uncommon to actually be able to keep up with them, right? The University of Scranton did a study showing that 40% of Americans make resolutions, which is a huge number. That's more than the number of people who watch the Super Bowl, but only 8% actually keep them. Why is it so hard to keep New Year's resolutions?
David: 7:09
Well, and there's a term for this. It's Resolution Dilution. As soon as you make the resolution for the New Year, yeah, they started getting diluted by the hour. This is reflected in, for example, going to the gym and people start going to the gym intensely January 1st through the 5th, by the time like January 10th comes, it's back to business as usual. And when we think, think about the psychology of New Year's resolutions, I think we have to build this aspect into them: the fact that most people who make New Year's resolutions, make them fully aware that they're not going to carry through. And so this is why I see most New Year's resolutions as largely feigned displays of resolve, in a way that's trite and superficial and semi-cynical. And I just don't see anything genuine about it. I really don't.
Ellie: 8:05
You're such a hater!
David: 8:06
Oh, I warned you all. This is going to be the episode of David doing nothing but being a wet blanket.
Ellie: 8:13
Well, let me dry out the blanket a little bit. No, that's not a phrase. Well, let me say, as a proponent of New Year's resolutions, that I've actually had some really great success with really important New Year's resolutions that have changed my life. Sure, I've had a lot of resolutions that have been sort of vague and inchoate and haven't really gone anywhere-- definitely my resolution to save more money, which is a common one, rarely gets implemented-- uh, however, in 2010, one of my resolutions was to meditate every day, and now it's 11 years later and I still do that. That was a huge transformation of my life that I undertook thanks to a New Year's resolution. It wasn't easy to implement, but now I've spent over a decade doing it.
David: 9:00
And that's great. Like I said, I think there are exceptions to the rule that I am spitting out here about how all the resolutions are superficial and vacuous.
Ellie: 9:10
Just giving you a counter-example!
David: 9:12
Exactly. I don't deny that, but I am nonetheless very skeptical about the institution of making promises around a specific time of the year, because I just don't understand why it has to be a ritualized to a specific season. And with all this brouhaha around it, if you want to start meditating, start meditating independently of what time of the year it is.
Ellie: 9:35
Well, yeah, but there is something that's so important about specific time markers, right? Like this is a very important part of human civilization, I think, is to have breaks, pauses, and those can't be constant. They have to be periodic, and having them happen at a socially recognized part of the year, I think is great.
David: 9:54
Yeah. But when we're talking about a practice like critically reflecting upon your life, it shouldn't be once a year, right? It seems like a fundamental feature of what it means to be human, to have the capacity to step back from your circumstances, from your conditions, say, "What do I want my life to be?" And it almost seems as if this tradition that we have, of making resolutions around the New Year, almost sequesters that critical thinking capacity that should be active at all times and limits it to a specific time of the year when there's already so many other things happening that doesn't really happen in earnest.
Ellie: 10:35
Well, then I think the problem is the broader issues in our society of superficiality and capitalist consumerism, not New Year's resolutions themselves, right? When New Year's resolutions get co-opted and put into this narrative of, "Do this one thing once a year," then obviously that's problematic, but I don't see that as an inherent issue with the ritual of New Year's resolutions, especially when they are supplemented by smaller, more localized and more frequent methods of self-examination, which I do also undertake.
David: 11:05
Yeah, but here we have a problem of multiple variables competing in your case. Do you have all those moments of critical reflection because you're in the kind of subject that engages in philosophical rumination, or are you changing your life because of the New Year's resolution that you made 10 years ago and that you couldn't have possibly made, had it not been at the right time and in the right place? You see what I mean? So I think resolutions express that deeper problem.
Ellie: 11:34
Yeah, I will say though that before I made the resolution to meditate daily, I had already had a practice of meditation for multiple years, but I had never done it as frequently as I then started doing it. And something about the social scaffolding of the New Year's resolution enabled me to actually implement it. And I will say that a crucial component of that was being part of a meditation group, this was when I was in college, who served as sort of accountability partners for me. So I do think that New Year's resolutions are best kept when they participate in the broader structures of accountability that we find in communities with others.
David: 12:13
Okay. And so that sounds much more interesting to me, but you are talking about a very, very small minority of resolutions, Because what we know, at least from empirical studies, is that over 90% of people who make resolutions do not carry them because they don't have the community support. That's never even part of the resolution itself, and because there is no real commitment on the part of the subject.
Ellie: 12:36
Well, I wonder then whether we could give people some tools that would help them commit to New Year's resolutions more. For instance, a lot of the articles that are written about New Year's resolutions talk about the SMART method, which is an acronym which refers to the fact that resolutions are best kept when they are specific, that's the S in smart, measurable, achievable relevant, and time-based. And so you don't want to have a sort of broad, overarching resolution, like "get healthy" or "meditate." You want to have a very specific type of resolution, and be able to see your progress in action. I think that's a really important part of it. Also the time-based component. When I was enacting my resolution to meditate daily, I was setting aside, at that point, two specific moments during the day. I've since gone down to one, but it's a specific time of day where I'm always doing that, almost in the same way that I would always be brushing my teeth. And I think that's a really helpful way to actually implement New Year's resolutions because they depend on integration into our daily habits.
David: 13:39
Well, and I wonder whether to this acronym of SMART, we can add something like CT, critical theory, so that you can reflect on the content of the resolutions that you desire in the first place. Why is it that the things that we want are to make more money? Why is it that the thing that we want is to lose weight? I think that even if the form of the resolution is in place and you have the tools you need to carry it out, the content is inseparable from that. And so I know that I sound very unfair, but people tie their happiness, or their idea of happiness for the following year, on controlling things that are ultimately not within their control, things that are not reasonable, things that are not achievable, and things that distract from other things that maybe they could do to improve their lives. And so maybe there's a distinction here between what is within our reach, what we can change through an act of resolve, and the things that require a different kind of approach. And here, I think maybe Stoicism might be a way to navigate this distinction, and think about act of making a New Year's resolution.
Ellie: 14:51
I think Stoicism is one of the most helpful philosophies out there for thinking about how we can actually implement New Year's resolutions in a way that feels authentic to ourselves and to our community. We mentioned earlier that New Year's resolutions were a common practice in ancient Rome. And this is in fact where the school of philosophy known as Stoicism thrived. I think Stoicism is a great philosophy for thinking about New Year's resolutions, as well as trying to be the 8% of people who actually are able to follow through on them. So let's think a little bit about Stoicism for a moment.
David: 15:24
Stoicism is a philosophical tradition that emphasizes philosophy as a way of life. So you should philosophize in such a way that your life becomes better. Stoics typically emphasize cultivating the self through living in accordance with rationality. So you ought to have reason control your desires so that you live an upstanding life. For Stoics, typically each person has a particular role to play in the web of nature. And so we should not be guided by pleasure or by our desires or whims, but by rational consideration of what the right course of action is under each specific circumstance and doing our duty at all times.
Ellie: 16:05
In order to cultivate our reason, we need to undertake a lot of actual practices, right? So I can't just say, like, "I choose to be guided by my reason now," instead I need to implement real-world everyday activities that are going to form my habits in such a way that I'm guided by reason. And one thing that's really important for Stoics here is a practice of meditation. Meditation helps us assess our role in the web of nature and in the web of human life. And we have to practice this every day through processes of self-examination. So I have to sort of take stock of myself on the regular in order to figure out who I am and what I should be doing.
David: 16:46
Yeah, meditation can help us reflect precisely on that which is within our control so that we can change it, versus that which is outside of our control so that we can let go of that. And for people such as Epictetus or the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, the highest philosophical value, the thing that brings about happiness, is self-rule, self-mastery, or self-governance. So being in control over yourself by exercising your rational capacities. And so the purpose of techniques like meditation is precisely to make sure that you are in full self-control or self-mastery.
Ellie: 17:24
And the Stoics thought that all people could, in principle, achieve this. So there is a kernel of a democratic egalitarianism in Stoicism, even though frankly, in practice, it's very much bound up with a patriarchal idea that women are irrational and men are rational, but one thing that's interesting to note here is that two of the most famous Stoics couldn't have been farther from each other on the social ladder. On the one hand you have the former slave Epictetus, and on the other, you have the Roman emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Both of them saw themselves acting out their place in the web of nature to achieve self-control within their given circumstances, And one thing that was really important for both of these philosophers was a daily examination of conscience. This would usually happen in the morning, for instance, that's when Marcus Aurelius did it. And when undertaking this daily examination, Aurelius would prepare himself for the tasks that he had to perform, as well as remind himself of how he would be spending his day that day. And I think most importantly for New Year's resolutions, reactivating the principles he needed in order to exercise his duty. So maybe he was working on patience, for instance, right? Like let me reactivate my commitment to patience, and then let me also think about how I'm going to be implementing that in my day. So this is creating a sort of relationship of the self striving towards itself. I'm trying to cultivate myself when I do this daily examination. It's not just a simple report. It's also a process of self-crafting and it strikes me that this is pretty similar to what people want to do when they're acting on resolutions.
David: 19:05
Okay. So here's where we see things a little differently, because one of the things that stands out to me about the Stoic approach to meditation is precisely that term, daily, that in order for meditation to catalyze a process of habit formation, it has to be repeated and it has to be rigorous and you have to be committed to it as a way of life all the time. And so a resolution is at work here, but not a resolution that is activated only once a year under specific conditions, but I can understand why there can also be a Stoic case the value of New Year's resolutions.
Ellie: 19:44
Yes, because the idea would be that you come to resolutions at given points in the year, and you act on them daily, right? And so in order to implement my New Year's resolution, yeah, I decide what I'm going to resolve on December 31st, but then each day thereafter-- including after January 7th, which is around the time that most people stop implementing their resolutions-- I am usually in the morning, but also hopefully at night and hopefully throughout the day, even, mindfully calling up this resolution and wanting to act on it. And I think Epictetus is so helpful in this respect because he talks a lot about the process of habit formation and how we become different almost behind our own backs, through changing our behaviors. So Epictetus says, for instance, that changing yourself is hard at first, but it gets easier over time. In order to become consistent with ourselves, we have to sort of have a one-step forward approach where I'm just looking at what's directly ahead of me, trying to call to mind my resolution, but I'm not constantly comparing my current self with my ideal self. If I were to do that, then I would probably just end up feeling hopeless. And so this process of changing oneself results in sort of just one day, me realizing that I am the self that I wanted to become. It's like this feeling of, "Oh wow, I guess I'm there already." So he says in his lectures here, and I'm going to read a
little passage from Epictetus: 21:15
"The first steps toward wisdom are the most strenuous because our weak and stubborn souls dread exertion without absolute guarantee of reward and the unfamiliar. As you progress in your efforts, your resolve is fortified and self-improvement progressively becomes easier." By and by it actually becomes difficult to work counter to your own best interest. One day, we contentedly realize we've stopped playing to the crowd. And so once you build up enough momentum that you're implementing the resolution, it actually becomes hard to go back and not implement it anymore. And go back to the way you were, which is like a beautiful moment.
David: 21:59
Yeah. And it goes to the common philosophical saying that habit becomes a second nature once it's carved into the flesh. So if you begin a certain practice- Somebody says that. I think maybe Montaine, um, who talks about habit as second nature. And, the general idea is that if you do something repeatedly, initially, it feels like an artifice. It's almost like a- like a prestigious that is added to you, that is external, but with time and with patience and through repetition, the prosthesis becomes an extension of the body. And so you get to the point where you can no longer tell the difference between, uh, what is so-called natural and what is artificial.
Ellie: 22:39
Yes. And in developing this, we need to have scaffolding in our everyday lives to encourage the progression of habit and really the cementing of habit. So we mentioned earlier that one thing that tends to work for people in keeping New Year's resolutions is to make them time-based. So you have a particular time of day that you're suddenly now devoting to your resolution. Two things that the Stoics did frequently in order to cement habits were one, journaling and two, letter-writing. So Stoics would not only take stock through a process of internal meditation, but they would also be writing down their daily activities and their principles. And importantly, they would be sharing them with their friends. So writing to a friend-- a lot of times, Stoics are sharing, really private, intimate details of their everyday life: what they ate, what they read, what they did, whether they had sex or masturbated and in doing so, they are giving themselves up to their friends for their own examination. They're encouraging the gaze of the Other and the relation to the Other to have an effect on their own process of self-cultivation.
David: 23:49
Yeah. And one of the points about these notebooks that they would keep, where they would write, you know, "I saw a hot man or a hot woman passing by and I felt the stirrings of the heart," you know-
Ellie: 24:00
Direct quote from Marcus Aurelius, by way.
David: 24:02
And I quote, "he was hella hot." But the purpose of this tracking, this surveilling, of the self is precisely to differentiate between those things that are within your control versus moments where your emotions are moved by something that you cannot control, like I'm sad that it's raining. That's just not something that falls into the same category. And so this keeping track allows you to make that distinction.
Ellie: 24:27
Yeah. And that distinction is what is sometimes called the dichotomy of control. This idea that there are certain things within my control, and there are certain things that are outside of my control and I need to figure out which is which, and then I'm good to go. William B. Irvine has a very hopeful account of this in the book, A Guide to the Good Life, which is a sort of modern take on Stoicism that I've used in classes before.
David: 24:51
And this highlights a point I really want to emphasize that motivates that hatred that I have for the vast majority of New Year's resolutions, as they are typically expressed, which is that you don't jump into a resolution and expect it to be successful in a vacuum. There has to be preparatory work leading up even to the making of a resolution, right? You have to make the right kinds of resolutions so that you don't end up in the situation that many of us are in, where we want to change aspects of our lives, that chances are, we're not really going to be ableto change.
Ellie: 25:28
Yeah, this has been a really interesting phenomenon in 2020, because I've seen a lot on social media about friends sharing their 2020 resolution lists and just like laughing hysterically, or maybe in some cases crying, because they were impossible to implement given the fact that COVID-19 changed our modes of being. So for instance, I had multiple friends whose New Year's resolutions in 2020, were to be more social, which is just hilarious.
David: 25:53
Good luck! Good luck girl!
Ellie: 25:56
And there's a viral Tiktok video with a woman reading her 2020 New Year's resolutions that went viral, I think, because she's hitting on precisely the shared sense that our 2020 resolutions went out the window.
Tiktok Audio: 26:10
Okay. Excuse my lumps. I'm just, you know, um, you know, in the middle of hitting rock bottom, but I found my goal list that I made in December for my goals for 2020. Okay, tell me if this is not hilarious. All right, goal one, make more money. I went, you know, been unemployed since March. Travel more. Lose weight. Be more social. Cry less. I wrote cry less. Cry less. I've cried every single day of this whole pandemic. Um, spend more time, funny, with grandma. And she died."
Ellie: 27:02
David, what are your thoughts on this?
David: 27:04
So there are two things about this that I think are very important. The first one is that the video draws our attention to the way in which material conditions can get in the way of our happiness. And this is essentially a Marxist point, that if you want to better your life, you have to change your material conditions. Uh, and so you have to look at the broader social structure. And often when we make New Year's resolutions, we don't do that. We don't think about the broader structures that condition our experience of the world. So think about, for example, the very common, "I want to make more money," resolution, you know? Oh, well, if poor people had just made a resolution, then no problem. And so a lot of resolutions on my view, individualize, things that are structural. That's the problem.
Ellie: 27:56
I totally agree with you on that. I think it's a major issue and research shows that people are more likely to work on self-development in times of affluence, precisely because they now have resources freed up to do so. And why would you make resolutions when you don't feel like you have control over your circumstances?
David: 28:12
That's the point, that under capitalism, especially when we're talking about economics, the vast majority of people don't have control over their circumstances. And so a lot of New Year's resolutions play an ideological function, and by that I simply mean that they trade on this meritocratic way of thinking, where if you just have the right attitude and the right mindset, you'll achieve whatever you want. It's the version of, you know, that New Age-y book, The Secret, where it's like-
Ellie: 28:39
Oh God.
David: 28:40
"Visualize it, it will become true."
Ellie: 28:43
Come to LA and we'll hang out and all you, all you have to do is spend an hour to hear people talk about manifestation.
David: 28:48
Thank you. And so there is this almost magical thinking to a lot of New Year's resolutions that really colors my views of the whole thing. I want to say that it is possible to have resolutions that are more meaningful, but "Not being poor," "making more money," certainly is not one of them.
Ellie: 29:08
And I completely agree with that. And in general, I'm very concerned with the way that capitalism privatizes what are actually public and collective issues. I think I still want to hold onto the idea that New Year's resolutions don't necessarily need to take that form and that they can have a really valuable place in people's lives. So I guess I'm wondering David, aside from the ways that new Year's resolutions are enacted under capitalist consumerism, is there something deeper to your hatred of New Year's resolutions that has to do with them intrinsically?
David: 29:42
That's a really good question. And if I'm being honest with myself, maybe my view is not as extreme as it's come out in this episode. And I blame Nietzsche because he convinced me that promises are inherently violent and ultimately resolutions are promises that you make to yourself.
Ellie: 30:04
Oh, let's get into it.
David: 30:08
Enjoying this episode? Please rate and review over thing on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Ellie: 30:26
In his book, On the Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche, sometimes known as philosophy's biggest hater- actually, that would go to Schopenhauer.
David: 30:34
No, Schopenhauer is just a denialist. He's just like an ascetic. Nietzsche hates, but with the passion of a thousand suns.
Ellie: 30:43
And with an affirmative passion, he hates ultimately because he loves. In any case, he talks in The Genealogy about how humans have developed to be the kinds of beings who make promises, and resolutions are promises that we make to ourselves. So thinking a little bit about Nietzsche's critique of promises will be helpful in assessing why David is so resistant to New Year's resolutions.
David: 31:07
Yeah. And I think Nietzsche was my first philosophical love, really, and my worldview as-
Ellie: 31:14
Cisgender man. Shocking!
David: 31:17
It was the mustache, the- it's just like magic combination.
Ellie: 31:22
I hated Nietzsche when I first read him.
David: 31:24
That's very surprising.
Ellie: 31:26
Cisgender woman? Not so much. Usually teenage boys love Nietzsche and teenage girls do not like Nietzsche. Read one page and you're hearing about his hatred of women and it's enough to kind of put you off it for a little bit.
David: 31:35
Fair enough. Point very well taken. For me, what was really important was his critique of Christianity, especially as somebody who grew up in Mexico, in a deeply, deeply Catholic environment. His interpretation of Christianity upended my worldview when I was a sophomore in college. And I have not recovered from that ever since. In, On the Genealogy of Morals, he writes about the way in which humans enter society largely by making promises. And so that's what differentiates us from the animals. Animals are forgetful creatures. They cannot make promises because they cannot remember them, and by definition, a promise requires memory, Whereas humans, because we are equipped with what he calls the memory of the will. We are able to engage in this act of promise-making.
Ellie: 32:27
And this is actually, for Nietzsche, what enables humans to have selves, this idea that I am going to be the same person tomorrow as I am today. So. For instance, if I tell you David, that I will pay you back tomorrow if you buy me lunch today, and then tomorrow you come back to me and say, where's my money, I mean, hopefully you wouldn't do that, but just theoretically-
David: 32:48
Is my money, Ellie?
Ellie: 32:49
Oh, where's my money. Um, and I'm like, I don't know what you're talking about. And you say, you promised to pay me back. I'm like, who is this you? I'm not Ellie Anderson. Then, that doesn't really work so well, right? The promise is inherently broken.
David: 33:06
And, one of the most unexpected and radical aspects of Nietzsche's writings on the history of morality is that he takes this faculty of memory, which is the condition for the possibility of promise-making, and he reevaluates it in a very interesting way. So most of us might say, "Oh, it's great that we have memories," precisely because as Ellie, you point out, that's what allows us to have a continuous sense of self. It's also what allows us to enter into contracts like social contracts, political contracts, economic contracts, but Nietzsche says this faculty of memory and this act of promise-keeping is actually what makes us sick. It violates the very basic principle of animal health that is so important for Nietzsche. So when nature writes about animals, he says, the great thing about animals is that they are forgetful, that they don't retain things in memory.
Ellie: 34:04
Yeah. But he also says that memory is the basis for beauty and culture.
David: 34:08
Yeah. both of those things are true. It creates this beauty, but it also turns us into an inverted animal, as he says, like a twisted, ugly creature that retains the past and cannot go.
Ellie: 34:20
That's rubbing itself on the bars of its own cage, to use his turn of phrase. I don't know that it's necessarily that memory is a bad thing, but rather that it has these drawbacks that we tend to not to recognize. Nietzsche thinks that we need a balance of memory and forgetting. And I guess, you know, maybe what you're suggesting David is that there's too much of a focus on memory in New Year's resolutions. You know, it also has to do with the fact that memory is closely linked to imagination and to fiction. We're never remembering things exactly as they were. And so when we're in the process of promise-keeping and remembering, which are closely tied for Nietzsche, we are also in the process of inventing ourselves and we're not successful at it, right? We fail to keep a lot of promises. We fail to remember a lot of things. We fail to keep our New Year's resolutions, right by February, you have stopped going to the gym.
David: 35:13
Yeah, but it goes a little bit deeper than that insofar as for Nietzsche, when you retain the past in the form of memory. You become what he calls a twisted animal, an inverted animal, and ultimately what he calls a creature of ressentiment, uh, somebody who can't let go of the past and dwells in it and constantly relives whatever offenses may have been launched against you, in the past. So it's a person that can't move forward because they carry the past like a beast of burden.
Ellie: 35:45
I also think though that this is a beautiful feature of selfhood. And I disagree slightly with Nietzsche on this point, although I actually think that there are resources Nietzsche for thinking that he has a slightly more complicated view of this as well. He talks about human culture as being rooted in our capacity for memory. And even if the self is a fiction, that doesn't mean that it doesn't have a certain utility. Even if resolutions are unlikely to be kept, that doesn't mean that they don't have an important role to play and are taking stock of the previous year and looking forward to the next.
David: 36:17
Yeah. And in connection to Nietzschean beauty, I think you're right, because he has both this view of humans as burdened by the past, crushed by the weight of the past and unable to move forward, and at the same time, he says, because we are crushed by the past, we create these beautiful things. So in some ways, Nietzsche's looking at humanity, being like, "Oh my God, look at this inverted twisted, creepy animal that makes pretty things," you know, it's like, like a creepy spider with a beautiful spider web.
Ellie: 36:51
Yeah, I would say the point is not to go back to a non-human animal way of living, where we don't have any memory, but instead to recognize that our capacity for memory or capacity for promise-making and our capacity for selfhood have come at a high price. And so I would say that's all the more reason to undertake these practices and to embark on a process of self-cultivation.
David: 37:15
Well, maybe, because for Nietzsche, there's also a problem with promise-keeping in terms of what it means to make a promise to yourself, or in terms of what it means to make a contract about your future self. So for example, if right now I say to you, you know, Ellie will be your friend forever, that's not a meaningful promise for Nietzsche because I cannot guarantee that a year from now, I will want to be your friend still.
Ellie: 37:43
Okay, fine, so we're not BFFs. I'll- I'll return that necklace I had made for you.
David: BFFN: 37:47
best friends for now, is a Nietzschean interpretation or think about the act of promising love to somebody else. I will love you forever. And Nietzsche says you cannot contract away the feelings of your future self. And it has to do with the plurality of the self, which is that the self is always changing.
Ellie: 38:09
And it's always multiple, even at a given moment.
David: 38:11
Yes. From the very beginning, it's a plurality, it's kaleidoscopic. And so that means that whenever you tie the future into the present, you're effectively subduing a future present a future past, which is the here and now.
Ellie: 38:28
I would say though that I think it's not subduing, it's rather relating the two, right. And so I think there's something necessary about me saying, "I resolve to do X," because I am making a commitment to doing that in the future. And even if I don't maintain that, I am saying my current self wants this for my future self. And even if I don't have the last word over my future self. I still have an important relation to it. And my future self has an important relation to my current self as it does to my other past selves as well. So I actually think one of the beauties of a resolution is that it allows you to create a tie between a present self and a future self and as well as past selves, right?
David: 39:12
Yeah. And this is the view, for example, of the Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, who writes very un-Nietzscheanly about promises. And she makes precisely this point, she says, "The value of promise making is that it roots us in a past, so that we're not just floating around the world of human affairs without any certainty, without any security, without any sense of continuity." And she applies this both to the person, so as a self, I know who I am, in light of the commitments that I have made, but also communally, as a community, what holds us together is the fact that, in the past, we made a pact or a promise to form a group, so Hannah Arendt is critical of Nietzsche precisely on this point.
Ellie: 40:02
Yeah, I think that's such an important point, because part of what helps me stick to my resolutions is relationships with my past selves, which of course are happening in my imagination. So it's different, for instance, from the Stoic practice of letter writing, where I have actual accountability partners and other people, but I do find that my past selves often hold me accountable, right. And so if, for instance, I'm going through a really hard time, but I remember a dream that I had for myself, a goal that I had for myself, when I was feeling much better, that helps me try and get out of the period of difficulty that I'm going through here and see the light at the end of the tunnel. When I experienced a difficult period of depression, thinking about my past selves, they felt very, very far away, and I kind of couldn't believe that my ambitions were as big as they were then, because I was going through a period of such darkness. But having them as imagined companions also helped me resolve to get out of this period. Of course, you don't get out of a period of depression by willing yourself out of it. That's the place where a New Year's resolution is not going to help you. It's a much more complicated process. But I think having my past selves goals in mind did help me in some indirect way. And it helps me in much more obvious and direct ways when I'm in a period of relative mental health and I'm able to come up with New Year's resolutions that are somewhat easy to stick with, right.
David: 41:30
Yeah. And I think that's very powerful, especially when thinking about those dark times where we need a life raft and we find it in our past lives, or in past versions of ourselves. And that allows us, again, to have that sense of continuity, "I used to be the person that wanted this," maybe I reflect on my present moment in a new way. And the thing that worries Nietzsche about that kind of retention of the past is a different kind of case. And so let's think about the situation in which I might love my partner. And then 15 years go by, and the force of the every day changes my sentiments in a deep way, and I no longer love them. And so Nietzsche raises the question, which is: is my future self accountable? Is my future self violating some rule, some moral code, some norm? Has my future self done something wrong and blameworthy in no longer loving? And so that's where Nietzsche says you cannot hold the future to the yoke of the past.
Ellie: 42:42
And I do think that that's important because our past selves are imagined, right? They're different from people in our community whom we are accountable to. But I actually think that past selves and future selves can be useful accountability partners, provided that we understand that in a somewhat loose sense. My own best accountability partner.
David: 43:03
Yeah.
Ellie: 43:04
Oh God, that sounds awful.
David: 43:06
I am my best accountability partner. By my Nietzschean philosophy, I am never accountable to my past. The best philosophical stance to take about promises is to not make any.
Ellie: 43:21
Well with that, to our listeners, if you are making resolutions this year, you might want to follow the SMART method. Make your resolution specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based. That's what I'll be doing.
David: 43:35
And of course, if you like me, don't want to make any resolutions, that's great too. But even if you are a critic, it does not mean that there isn't value to trying to take charge of your life. It just means that we try to do it on a daily basis without necessarily waiting for a specific marker.
Ellie: 43:55
So now you might be kinda open to 'em. I see.
David: 43:59
I cannot promise anything about my view, on resolutions and promise-keeping.
Ellie: 44:05
I am not even David Pea-Guzman.
David: 44:07
But I do remember that you owe me some money.
Ellie: 44:12
We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
David: 44:20
You can email us with questions, feedback, or even requests for life advice at DearOverthink@gmail.com.
Ellie: 44:28
You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter at @overthink_pod. We want to thank Anna Koppelman, our production assistant, Samuel P.K. Smith for the original music, and Trevor Ames for our logo.
David: 44:41
Thanks so much for joining us today!