Have you decided on your New Year’s resolutions? What are they? Lose weight? Change jobs? Begin exercising? We have about a week to make some meaningful life choices—or just start something simple and doable. Recall that most resolutions are broken by the end of February. So, if you want to avoid being part of that statistics, start small.
Mine is very simple: to view the Milky Way starry sky, as I don’t remember the last time I saw one. I went on many camping trips with friends and their kids when our son was growing up, but I still can’t recall the image.
In any case, that is my New Year’s resolution—or perhaps more appropriately, I should call it one of the items on my 2025 bucket list. However, that hardly means I have everything else in life planned out and under control. Maybe a little, in the sense that I have begun to approach my lifestyle activities with more intention. Intentionality means laying out routines for nutrition, physical health, interaction with the environment, and perhaps doing things to keep my brain updated and healthy.
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I started this reflective piece with the grandiose concept that everyone is grappling with currently—New Year’s resolutions. So, I thought I would share mine. Why not? What I am particularly drawn to now is the notion of essentialism as a lifestyle choice. I have a vague notion of it from the minimalism movement. I take essentialism to mean the mindful use of your resources—time, money, and skills—to uplift your values and virtues. Well, you have to figure out what your values and virtues are. Let me give you some hints.
What is essentialism, you might ask? The answer can be both complex and simple at the same time. Let’s go for the simpler definition. Just look around and consider what resonates with you: how we treat each other in politics or social media, the exploitation of nature and natural resources, violence, ubiquitous consumerism, inequality, the healthcare crisis—the list goes on. Many of these problems are universal. It may feel overwhelming and out of control, leaving you feeling helpless.
Then ask yourself some questions. Does the answer lie in an electoral victory by the left or the right? Will moving to Mars solve our existential crisis, as some argue? Then there’s the threat of AI, ready to pounce on us, we’ve been told. What about those Russian and Iranian bots manipulating votes, not to mention the tribal disinformation campaigns. Are we really living in a simulation or a Maya—not the kind speculated by quantum physicists, but of our own making—the socio-techno bubble?
Is there anything we can do about it? Maybe or maybe not. At the very least, we can try by pausing to look around and make sense of it all. I call this a mindful pause or reflection. Perhaps that mindful pause itself could be a New Year’s resolution. Understanding the current mayhem and generating some intentionality about finding a path forward could be a good start. For instance, finding communities or thinkers concerned with similar issues could give you a sense of hope.
There are communities, thinkers, and organizations grappling with these concerns, trying to create spaces that present alternatives to the current bot-driven techno-market. No, I am not talking about the utopian hippie communes of the seventies. These are more down-to-earth, science-driven ideas like Game2.0, The Inner Development Goals (IDG), and the Second Renaissance movements (see links below). The basic premise of these emerging thought processes is to seek scientific solutions to modern problems, find efficient ways to communicate ideas, and be thoughtful about using our resources—time, money, and skills—on things that matter, both now and in the future.
Exploring new ideas that can help you understand where you are, where you are going, and where you may want to head could be a good start. I call this essentialism. This is why I made it my New Year’s resolution—to explore new paths forward. You can do the same. Good luck!
