5 Ways to Mess Up Your New Year Before It Starts

Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash

The change of the calendar provides us a time to thoughtfully rewind through the previous twelve months: to inventory our decisions, to reflect on upon all we’ve seen and experienced and to make grand plans for the coming year.

Most of us find ourselves composing resolutions we hope will make us healthier, less stressed, and more focused—but those might actually be guaranteeing our misery and perceptions of our failure.

Here are 5 surefire ways to really mess up 2025 before it even starts.

1) Fix everything, everywhere, all at once.

There’s a pressure we put on ourselves at this time of year to make wholesale alterations. Caught up in a seasonal fever of unrealistic expectations and unreasonable parameters, it’s easy to set ourselves up for disappointment by mid-January.

Any bad habits, areas of neglect, or places of regression didn’t arrive overnight and they won’t depart quickly, either. We can sabotage our progress and derail ourselves emotionally by attempting to immediately wipe away months or even years of normalized maladjustment and accumulated unhealthy patterns.

Real, sustainable transformation happens because of the incredible power of incremental change over time. You want to mess up your new year? Think you can turn the page of the calendar and magically transform the elaborate and sprawling dysfunction and unhealth it took you years or decades to make.

Instead: Make simple, sustainable decisions regarding your thinking, schedule, media intake, and personal health, which by themselves might be almost imperceptible from the outside—and watch what happens when time compounds your simple, repeated daily efforts. Incremental movement is real movement.

2) Develop negativity narcissism.

No one cares about you or what you’re doing right now.

Not that there aren’t people who love you and are deeply invested in you and your well-being, of course there are. It’s just that with very few exceptions, at any given time, people here are too preoccupied with figuring out how to be human and confronting the nagging existential dread over their own flaws and failings, to do as much thinking about you as you think they do.

It’s easy to fall into the seductive narcissistic trap of imagining that everyone is assembled together somewhere gossiping about us, conspiring to criticize our choices, collectively celebrating our failures, colluding to engineer our demise, or convening to list our fashion decisions and body imperfections. The truth is, the only person obsessed with us, is us. Looking for a way to mess up your coming year? Waste your energy imagining that people are thinking about you. They probably aren’t.

Instead: Unapologetically be whoever it is you are at any given moment. Wear what makes you feel comfortable, do the things that give you joy, advocate for the causes you’re passionate about, define yourself the way you feel is authentic—and discard the myth of other people’s opinions.

3) Care less than you do right now.

Yes, I did just suggest that you stop worrying about what people think about you but this isn’t that. One of the most tragic byproducts of days when cruelty is so prevalent and where compassion has become a supposed woke character flaw, is that empathetic people have found themselves drifting toward apathy or resolving to choose the path of least emotional resistance.

The fact that you are deeply internally invested in the suffering and injustice around you is a beautiful, necessary, and increasingly rare impulse. One of the reasons things around here have become as jacked up as they have, is because we have a poverty of empathy birthed by political and religious movements that declare a bleeding heart to be a liability not an asset. If you really want to mess up your year, stop giving a damn or staying informed or being aware.

Instead: Cultivate a lifestyle of sustainable compassion. The goal isn’t for you to care less about people or the planet, it’s to develop a series of daily practices, simple disciplines, and routine self-care that will help you care more for longer. Balance the wounds the world receives with the wounds you receive tending to those wounds.

4) Compare yourself to someone else.

Someone recently said to me, “John, I’ve read everything you’ve ever written!” I replied with a laugh, “Congratulations. Now you know one hundred percent of what I choose to share publicly!”

I know you know this, but social media is an intricate mirage. To some degree you, me, and everyone you interact online with is engaged in a continual and elaborate conspiracy of pretending: showing filtered, edited, carefully-curated versions of ourselves in the hopes of presenting us in a light that will be most flattering and attractive.

Whether a celebrity you admire, an influencer you follow, or your seemingly flawless, perpetually positive next door neighbor—no one is showing you the stuff that they’re truly haunted or embarrassed by. The virtual world we’re immersed in every day is made of false facades, magic hour lighting, and airbrushed perfection. We can really mess up this year by thinking we have to compete with that.

Instead: Navigate social media wisely this year, remembering how insidious comparison sickness is and how prone to pretending we all are. Log off often and resolve to make your only competition the person you were yesterday. That is the only one whose flawed humanity you really see fully anyway.

5) Waste your time.

It’s so easy to allow the days to fly through our hands: to squander hours obsessing on the state of the world, of mindlessly doom-scrolling on social media, of procrastinating away dreams we’ve shelved, trips we’ve always wanted to take—or postpone simply doing, becoming, or saying something we aspire to.

One of the greatest lies we tell ourselves, is that we have all the time in the world: that we can afford to put off the important or live without urgency or imagine that “real life” is something ahead in the distance that we’re waiting on. If you really want to mess up the coming months, live in such a way that you find yourself a year from now with the same paths unexplored, the same chances not taken, the same desires unexpressed.

Instead: Choose an age you’re likely to leave this planet. Be overly optimistic here. Then, add up the time you’ll have left: the number of days, the number of summers, the number of Sundays—and decide you’re going to embrace more of them and that you’re going to start today.

Bonus Number 6: Anticipate perfection.

You’re going to make a mess and likely fairly soon. At some you’ll act impulsively, choose poorly, say words you shouldn’t have, premeditatedly do something stupid, or fail to live your values. Big fuckin’ deal. Welcome to humanity, the rest of us have been expecting you. The biggest mistake you could make in 2025 is to pretend the sky is falling or to beat yourself up when you fall or fail. Nothing will mess this coming year up more than you being surprised, angry, or punitive when you act like a human being.

What might you add to the list?

What are some other ways people can mess up the year. Let me know in the comments.