New Year, New Wants
on wanting and resolutions
A few years ago I stopped making detailed resolutions. I thought they were frivolous, often performative when put on display, and that requiring a date to change my behaviour was silly. Why wait until the calendar flips a new year when I could just change now?
Instead, I resorted to crafting general principles for the year ahead and haphazardly revisited them around my birthday as a bi-annual check-in. In retrospect, I was too nervous to scribe my superficial wants to paper as the idea of writing my harboured dreams in ink only brought the possibility that they could be used as evidence to document my failure. Further, in an age where ‘aspirational’ social media influencers and heady podcasts implore us to “manifest” our wishes, I found myself tired and burned out. Detailed milestones that wait to be crossed off in my journal could fail me but vague principles could not, I thought.
However, as I step into this new year, I consider the precarity of the world around me. Compounded by the many dreams deferred, I entertain the thought of a list. There is a strange comfort in having something to check off, a tally of accomplishments to cling to.
This is why, this year, I want to be explicit about what I hope to accomplish. Yes, my guiding principles will remain but I am eager to write out my wants no matter how small or seemingly insurmountable.
Over the past few years, the idea of wanting seemed flippant. Having material desires that I could potentially do without appeared glib and so, instead, I prioritized needs. But now, in the dawn of this new year where the future continues to vibrate with uncertainty, I feel a familiar pang in my belly for wants. I’ve always been greedy. An only child if you haven’t noticed.
I used to be ashamed of wanting but now it’s all I do. I want, I desire, I daydream. It's tacky to want out loud, to admit that your life isn’t where you've dreamt it to be. And yet, there is also something romantic about the alchemy between where you sit today and where you want to be sitting. Your Future You gazes back at Present You, glancing over a shoulder, and pats the seat next to them as if to say “Saved you a spot” and all you have to do is step up and sit.
A scene unspools in my head from the last season of HBO’s Big Little Lies. In this scene Mary Louise, brought to life by Meryl Streep, calls Reese Witherspoon’s character (Madeline), a “wanter.” It should be mentioned that there is an underlying friction between the two women. Mary Louise has come to Monterrey to investigate her son's death that she instinctively deduces Madeline has something to do with. Mary Louise proceeds to explain that “There are people in life who are content with what they have and there are others who just… just want.”
At first blush, Mary Louise calling Madeleine a “wanter” seems like a hostile jab and Madeline, proudly offended, rejects the title. But then, something surprising happens. Mary Louise admits that she, too, is of the “wanter” variety and it’s because of this that she can see Madeline for who she really is. She recognizes the hunger hidden beneath Madeline’s model-Monterrey-mommy veneer as the same propelling desire she has. She clocks her.
Well, leave it to Meryl Streep to make being earnest and ambitious seem chic. While others like Rachel Barry from Glee, Ash Ketchum from Pokémon, Hillary Clinton, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Anne Hathaway - all “wanters” in their own right - have been perceived as self-serving, calculated, and even unrealistic for their wants, through the portrayal of Mary Louise, Streep cuts to the truth about possessing wants and dreams. Nothing is embarrassing about wanting. Wanting something should be reason enough to pursue it.
I try to pinpoint the language for this new enthusiasm for wanting. The first two definitions are accurate but contain too much of the pessimistic stink of the present to be optimistic about the future:
First, the word “earnest” comes from the Old Latin “arrabo” meaning “a pledge.” Coming off a couple years where we’ve collectively felt that many commitments have been broken — the promise of a sustainable health care system, the security of global aid to those who need it most — it seems foolish to make yet another pledge when our landscapes are constantly shifting. A “pledge” is more akin to a blood oath rather than something to wish for excitedly.
Correspondingly, the word “want” stems from the Old Norse word “vanta” which means “to be lacking.” I imagine that “lacking” is a common feeling as we head into another year of uncertainty. Correct again but I don’t need to be reminded of all the things I’ve lost; the Memories notification on Google Photos does this nicely (and without warning).
Finally, I interrogate the word “resolution” and it immediately feels like a future I want to make a home in. “Resolution” comes from the Latin “resolvere” which means to “loosen up” or “release.”
Whereas the first two etymologies felt like a prison or a vacancy, “resolution” feels like the opposite. By writing down my wants for the year, I release them to a world outside of my head. Rather than quarantine them to my thoughts, I can acknowledge that the world around me is changing whilst writing new possibilities for myself amidst the fluid current. I give them, my little wants, a chance to breathe and reward myself with a sense of wonder that I haven’t allowed myself to feel in a while. Sure, more than half of these resolutions won’t come to fruition but I don’t care. At this point, we are used to false starts and have learned to be futurists without being married to a particular vision of it. The only difference is now we have the buoyancy to rewrite it. And scratch it out. And then rewrite it until it starts to stick again. Our wants and expectations and resolutions for the future are rendered non-linear, curved, and fractured like the lifelines in our palms we write them out with.
LOOSEY’s Guide to Wanting
About a month or so ago, I created a game of wanting with a friend to help define what we wanted in 2024. I entertained the idea of a vision board but I always preferred the practice of journalling (duh). Beyond that, I believed that having a vision board above my bed would be tacky and not #aesthetic. As for the game, I kind of winged it but I can honestly say that return to the results of the third step almost every single day when deciding where to place my energy. I wanted to share it to help define your wants for 2024, if interested.
2023 Year In Review: The first step is to rank your 2023 across specific categories out of ten. You can add up arrows next to pillars that have improved vs. 2022 and down arrows for areas that have not. We found this aspect helpful because even when we had low numbers or categories that declined, it was contrasted by high numbers and growth in others. This allowed us to see where we were putting our energy and if we felt the trade-off between categories (ie. Health vs. Fun, hmm?) was worth it. The categories can be whatever you want but, for context, here is what we graded our 2023 on:
Family
Friendships
Career
Love / Intimate Relationships
Health
Fun
Travel
Passion Projects
It’s not normal – nor truthful – to have ten ten tens across the board. Some areas will be low and that’s okay. You have to pick ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ for each year of your life. At least, that’s how I’m narrating it to myself.
2024 Focus Areas: After a long and spirited deliberation, we picked our focus areas for 2024 from the above categories. You can pick as many as you want but I’d challenge you to take a hint from the title of this section and focus. I picked two: an area with the lowest number that I wanted to significantly improve and an area that was one of the highest that I wanted to grow even further. This, again, catalyzed debate.
Detailing: Okay, so this is the part where a vision board would come in handy but I am not of the cut-out pictures-and-glue-gun-shit-to-construction-paper tribe. If you are, go ‘head girl.
In this final stage, write in precise detail what a ‘ten’ would look like for the categories you are focusing on. If you want to buy a house, write exactly what street it is on (Google Maps, baby!), what the garage doors look like, and what the drama is in your new neighbourhood. If you want to focus on your career, write out what your new email signature looks like after your promotion and where you are going out to celebrate when you cash your new pay cheque. It will seem silly until it comes true. Trust me.
That’s it! Return to #3 whenever you need to make a decision. If you’re caught between a crossroad, pick whatever gets you closer to your focus area, whatever best matches the life you have detailed for yourself.
That’s all folks. Thanks for riding with LOOSEY this year. Forward this on to someone you love and I’ll be back to you in the New Year. Sooner than you know it.
