Resolutions

 At some point in the middle of 2021, some internet self-help wisdom managed to trickle down to me sufficient to convince me that what I really needed to do in order to solve all my life problems and conquer adulthood was to make my bed right after I woke up. I therefore started doing so punctiliously each morning. I swore to myself that each day, before I did anything else, I would make that bed; because, after all, if I can't do something as simply as make the bed, how can I expect to accomplish anything else? 

I made it about two days under this new regime, then collapsed into the worst spell of melancholic depression I'd suffered in years, read Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea, quit my job and went to law school. 

At some point in the middle of last year, now a law student, I woke up one morning, and it suddenly bothered me to see my sheets mussed together and bunched up. I smoothed them out and made the bed. Then, the next morning after that, I made the bed again. And again the morning after that. And every morning since then, I have once again made the bed. This time, I don't recall making any grand resolutions about it. I never formed the intention in my brain of forswearing an unmade bed from this day forward. I just started making it each morning and kept on doing it. 

In looking back on why this project failed so dramatically the first time, only to succeed effortlessly and unconsciously a year later, it seems to me that the difference must lie in the nature of resolutions themselves. 

When I approached making the bed as a lifelong commitment—something I would henceforth have to do every morning, whether I wanted to or not—then I was beset by a vision of myself as if I were making this bed between two mirrors, repeating the same task across an infinite regress, into the remotest distance, adding up over the course of a lifetime to countless hours of bed-making. In order to justify such an appalling investment of time, there needed to be some commensurate reward. 

But, there was none. Making the bed didn't instantly make me feel much happier or better about my life. It didn't solve any problems for me other than no longer having an unmade bed. Where was the reward to justify so many hours of my lifespan? 

And once I had realized the investment-reward ratio was off, then it took only another small step to realize that the way out of this terrible bargain lay entirely in my own power. No one was holding me to my word but me. No one else cared. All I had to do was release myself from my own ill-conceived contract. And so I did, with a burst of relief. The resolution was banished! Freedom was restored! But then... my bed remained unmade. 

Why then, though, if I rebelled against this contract so heartily the first time around, was I able to comply with its same terms so effortlessly just a year later? If my theory holds true, it is because there was no resolution the second time around. 

Each time I made the bed, under the second regime, was seen as the first and last time. It implied nothing necessarily about any future bed-makings. It was an uncaused event in a Humean universe where the logic of induction had been banished. And so, I could make the bed each morning without having to feel burdened by any pledge to make it tens of thousands of times more. Instead of committing thousands of hours of my life to this project, I was committing only about sixty seconds at a time. And this sacrifice then seemed much more commensurate to the limited reward of this activity. 

I find my theory supported in the pages of literature, which bear testimony to the fact that the greatest barrier to lasting behavior change is the resolution itself. 

I was reading this week what is probably the best novel ever penned on the subject of resolution-making (and -breaking): Italo Svevo's modernist classic, Zeno's Conscience. The novel—an ironic portrayal of unheroic mediocre humanity as it muddles its way through the confusions of modern history, reminiscent in this way of Flaubert's Sentimental Education—takes as its subject a quintessentially weak-willed man. The titular Zeno fails in love, cheats on his doting wife, undertakes an elaborate sacrifice on behalf of his deceased brother-in-law that is ultimately misinterpreted by the woman it is intended for, and so on. 

In all these endeavors, Zeno strives to be good. His life and papers are littered with resolutions to change his behavior, subsequently abandoned. And standing in for all these larger failures of will is the protagonist's persistent inability to quit smoking. 

The novel was penned, of course, before any modern understanding of addiction, or even before medical professionals expressed any doubts about the health effects of cigarettes. Thus, Zeno's doctors see no reason for his quixotic attempts to quit smoking; nor are they much help in explaining why it is so difficult. Zeno is left to attribute his inability to put aside the cigarette to his general weakness of character; and so smoking is added to his list of bad habits—up there with infidelity—that he wants to but cannot break. His papers are full of declarations to the effect that "this next cigarette will be the last cigarette." Yet, a few weeks after that, there is another last cigarette. Then another one after that. 

Zeno recognizes that part of the problem is his attraction to the grand gesture of the resolution itself. He admires the nobility of renunciation—one more, then never again!—which, he notes, makes the last cigarette taste even sweeter (just as the last time he ever sleeps with his mistress is, he tells us, the happiest moment of his life). But if the last cigarette becomes actually the last, then there will be no more excuses for the noble gesture, no more chance to repeat the great renunciation, and this is a terrible loss... so Zeno finds himself smoking again. 

A friend whom he seeks out for advice on the matter offers a theory similar to my own. He thinks that the resolutions to quit smoking create in Zeno's mind an oppressive burden, from which he is then motivated to free himself by taking up his cigarettes again. As the narrator recounts it: 

"[H]e explained to me that my real disease lay not in the cigarette but in the decision-making. I should try giving up the habit without any resolutions or decisions. In me—he felt—over the course of the years two persons had come into being, one of whom commanded, while the other was merely a slave who, the moment surveillance weakened, flouted his master's will out of a love of freedom. The slave was therefore to be granted absolute freedom, and at the same time I should look my habit squarely in the face, as if it were new [....] It should not be fought, but neglected and forgotten in a certain way[.]" (William Weaver translation throughout). 

This advice, it seems to me, is getting close to the truth: at least, it has identified the real problem with resolutions, namely that, when they are framed as a lifelong renunciation, they then add up to an enormous investment of time and effort. When one part of you is asking for such an enormous sacrifice, it is only a matter of time before the other part recognizes that this stern master has no actual power over the entire organism, and that one can in fact renounce the renunciation and regain one's freedom. And what human being does not have enough "love of freedom" to want to take that option? 

The problem with the friend's advice is that, even as it does identify the resolution as the true problem, it does not effectively do away with it. It still sets the goal as that of "giving up the habit" in perpetuity; and thus it takes the form of a resolution itself—albeit one that has been semantically disguised. And one cannot fool oneself so easily for any length of time. Thus, as soon as Zeno seeks to implement the advice, he ends up smoking again, then castigating himself for it, then resolving to stop once again, and so—he tells us—he "renewed the decision [he] had tried to abolish," and thus, "It was a longer way round, but it arrived at the same place."

But, will not any version of the friend's advice end up in the same place? Does not every renunciation of a habit require in fact a renunciation, and so will it not demand the same mammoth effort of will, no matter how it is phrased? 

Actually, no. This is what my bed-making experience teaches. One can give something up for a day, without making any plans to give it up again the day after that. And this way of making the sacrifice immediately resets the balance between investment and reward. 

After all—Zeno's friend is surely right: who among us would not want to get out from under the stern command of a superego that demands a lifelong sacrifice—a permanent forswearing from us? If a part of ourselves asks such a thing—and we remain in control of that part—why would we not simply defy its orders at the first opportunity and escape into freedom? 

But what if the superego asks, not a lifetime of altered behavior, but simply thirty seconds of it. What if it asks us only: "make this bed, this morning"—or, "put aside this cigarette, for now—you can always smoke it later." That is much less to ask, and the equation then seems in balance. If the problem with a resolution is that it asks a sacrifice that ramifies to infinity—implicating all the future days of our lives—and that this is out of all proportion to the psychological reward to be obtained from having a made bed—then the solution may lie in making a smaller demand that is more proportionate. One thereby changes the > sign in the relation to an =.

My sister's testimony bears this out as well. When describing her own attempts to make her bed, she related: "I couldn't do it so long as I thought that making the bed was going to change my life and fix all my problems. But once I thought of it just as doing a nice thing for my future self, then I could do it." In other words, the equation was brought back into balance. 

I also think about other times I have made a significant and lasting change in behavior in my life. None of them came about as a result of a successful resolution or a renunciation. They all came about through making a series of discrete decisions, none of which implied anything about the others, or committed me to anything for the rest of my lifetime. 

I think, for instance, about how I became a vegetarian (well, pescatarian, fine—I cheat with fish). This didn't come about because I one day forswore meat. It happened because I went to a restaurant one day and thought—"I'll try doing this meal vegetarian, and see how it goes—I can always switch back if I don't like it." I never ate meat again after that—at least not red meat or poultry—and I never suffered any particular cravings for them either. Because I had never denied them to myself in the first place. I just stopped eating them.

There was no stern task master standing over me and demanding that I make a sacrifice. There was no other part of myself oppressing me and inspiring my will for freedom. There was only me, making this one choice, this one time, and finding that the small but real satisfaction that I derived from it was in fact a perfectly proportionate reward to the equally small sacrifice I had made.