Stop internalizing other people’s desires

Mistakes people make with their New Years’ resolutions #2

This is Part 2 of a multi-part series.
Part 1: Don’t make your New Years’ resolutions harder than they need to be.

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“Desires come from the sense organs” is one of my favorite sayings.

The last time I wrote about it, I was talking about Charlie Kirk and memetic infohazards, which was a pretty heavy topic.

I’ve known for years that I could influence my hobbies with my digital consumption. When I watch lifting YouTube, I’m much more motivated to go lift in the gym—and when I get off YouTube, I tend to stick to bodyweight calisthenics. After reading the news or other policy analysis, I usually want to get more involved with politics. And of course, I tend to meditate and journal more after I consume any content related to mental health.

But today, I’m going to be talking about it in a more benign way: how it relates to New Years’ resolutions.

To explain, I’m going to go more into that example from earlier: lifting YouTube.

No matter how much lifting content I do or don’t consume, I always want to work out in some way, shape, or form. Being strong and fit is a deeply ingrained value of mine: I like aspiring to it on aesthetic grounds, physical health grounds, self-improvement grounds, spiritual grounds,¹ yadda yadda. I am a lifter down to my core.

However, some lifting goals—getting abs, breaking PRs on certain exercises like the bench press, bulking to 200lbs—only enter my mind when I see someone do those things on YouTube. It’s fine to chase these kinds of goals, especially in the short-term goal,² but the more intrinsic the goal, the easier it will be to sustain in the long-term, because you’ll still want to live by your values even when no one is influencing you.

Big Brother telling you to get Jacked and Tan

If you removed all of my screens and social media, I may or may not be trying to hit a new Overhead Press PR. But I can absolutely guarantee that I’d still be doing pushups and pullups in my room, just like I’ve been doing on and off for the past 10+ years.³

Under normal circumstances (i.e. most of human history), this probably wasn’t a huge deal. When the Babylonians did their New Years’ resolutions 4,000 years ago—no, I’m being serious—they probably didn’t have to deal with the excess inputs of modern advertising, screens that fit in your pocket that you take out so you can see things and desire them, and the evil evil television.

Unfortunately, in the modern day, we have to deal with all of those things. And if you’re not careful, they can have a real effect on your goals, plans, and actions. Just think about all those New Years’ resolutioners who start going to the gym and quit before the end of January,⁴ or all the fad diets that seem to appear and disappear from and into primordial chaos, or all the “30-day challenges” that sweep the internet by storm. Hell, have you ever taken a cold shower to get on the grindset, or whatever the hell people say about those things? Do you know someone who has? That’s exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about.⁵

Moreover, people in our lives exert huge influences on our goals and values. Parents can imbue their kids with respect or disdain for certain careers or artistic pursuits; your friends can influence you to take up their hobbies; society at large can influence you in a very indirect way by making certain goals, values, and lifestyles more visible, while shunning other perfectly valid goals (or lack thereof!)

So, the mistake to avoid is accidentally internalizing someone else’s desires as if they were your own. It might feel natural to see something cool and be inspired by it, but unless you actually care about the thing in and of itself, your inspiration probably won’t be enough to follow through. And, if your resolution isn’t something that is actually important to you or your values, why would you follow through on it?

Thus, if you want to increase your chances of following through on your New Years’ resolution(s), you probably also want to figure out your intrinsic values, wants, and desires are, and practice the skill of figuring out which is which., It might also behoove you to take some time to think about these things alone, without any screens or other influences to psyop desires into your brain inception-style. Maybe consider grabbing a journal of some kind—I use my notes app, but some people swear by pen and paper—and externalize your thoughts somewhere you can see them.⁶

If you want an explicit prompt, here are two that I like:

• Hamming Questions. First, ask yourself: what are the most important problems in my life? (Alternatively, what is the single most important problem in my life?) and journal about it in detail. Then, ask yourself: why haven’t I solved it yet?

• Goal Factoring. This one is harder to explain—you should probably just read the post (it’s short)—but the basic idea is to choose an action you’re already undertaking and figure out if it’s really the best option you have right now.

The other and probably more well-adjusted way to figure out what you want is to talk to a bunch of people (particularly your friends, bonus points if they’re good listeners) and have them:

1. Rubber duck for you—you can do this with a journal but things that sound normal in your mind sometimes sound really weird and stupid when said to someone else.

2. Listen to catch things you can’t catch yourself—therapists are very good at this, but sufficiently practiced, patient, and determined friends will also do this (they also have the benefit of already knowing you, unless you already have a therapist, but if you have a therapist I don’t think you need this advice tbh).

3. Give you advice—bonus points if all of their advice is conflicting, because you’ll realize that different people have different POVs, and you’ll figure out your own true wants by figuring out who and what you agree or disagree with.

Unfortunately, there are only two weeks left until New Years’, which is probably not long enough to master the skill of introspection. In fact, no period of time is enough to master the skill of introspection, unless you manage to become an enlightened Buddha or something, but at that point you’re probably beyond the concept of the New Years’ resolution anyway so I wouldn’t really worry about it. The point is that you shouldn’t worry about “figuring it out”: you have the rest of your life to do so!⁷

Anyway, as you introspect, you might find that you want less than you thought—or more than you thought—or simply something entirely different. You also might begin to realize when “your” desires actually come from someone else: for example, maybe your desire to get rich really comes from your parents’ wish that you’d “make it”, or your desire to get married and have kids right away comes from your grandparents who want grandkids, or that your desire to become a physicists stems from a hidden pride about being better at math than other people your age (true story: link UChicago article). And that’s all fine!

The more you realize, the more you’ll understand why your various past actions and plans succeeded or failed, and the more you’ll be able to predict what will and will not work in the future (along with understanding what it is you actually want). Furthermore, the more you get used to introspection, the better you’ll be at introspection by doing, and the more you’ll learn from your future plans and actions. It’s a virtuous cycle!⁸

This post might seem like it’s too simple or formulaic to work. If so, I apologize; my advice is the way it is because I literally cannot give you specific advice without knowing you and your life story, which would take like at least an hour of conversation (and probably more like five). Any self-help guru who doesn’t admit this—or at the very least doesn’t admit to getting around this by tailoring their advice to the particular kind of target audience that already needs to hear it (see Should You Reverse Any Advice You Hear?)—is at worst a grifter and at best doing some trolling.

And though I present the process as if it’s a linear path that you can follow one step at a time, in reality it’s probably going to look like a mess of squiggles. There’s no point where you’ll ever have everything figured out. The process of setting goals, achieving them or failing in the process, and then re-evaluating is continuous and never has an end. And better yet, there are certain things you’ll find out in the process of trying to achieve your goals that will change your goals or make you realize that your values weren’t what you thought they were (or some other event that throws you into confusion). The idea isn’t to never struggle again: it’s to struggle in a more fulfilling way.⁹

So try not to get too lost in the specifics. All of the above advice can be useful for the right people and in the right contexts, but if you’re just trying to understand yourself better so you can make better decisions, the only important point is to confront your aspirations and values—along with the associated tangled mess of feelings that you’ve probably been avoiding. If you find yourself in the weeds of cost-benefit analyses, take a step back to think about how you got to this point, and then try again. If you’re feeling things that are mildly uncomfortable but ring true to you, you’re probably on the right path.¹⁰

My hope with this post is to serve as a starting point for your own journey. But ultimately, only you’ll be able to really know what it is you want to do.

Good luck!

TLDR: It’s time to begin asking yourself the big questions. Who are you, and what do you want?

1. one must imagine Sisyphus jacked as hell. Indeed, my all-time favorite quad exercise—the Sissy Squat—is named after the guy.

2. also a topic for another post: the TDLR for right now is that not all of your goals and plans should be meant to last forever

3. I’ve been doing pushups for as long as I can remember (you’d think I’d be better at them after all this time but whatever) and I started training for pullups in 6th grade. I couldn’t do pullups at that time, but I was doing them with bands and negatives and whatnot. Let me know if I should write a guide to getting your first pullup!

4. as a regular gym-goer, I want you to know that if you’re this kind of person, I’m rooting for you! Some of us lifters and exercisers are curmudgeons, but most of us remember what it was like to be a newbie trying it out for the first time, and we’re more than happy to share our spaces with people who are just trying to better themselves. In fact, a large part of why I’m writing this guide is to try to get people into the gym!

5. nothing against cold showers per se. I’ve just never understood them. “I want to do something hard!” like, really? Do you not have any other hard thing that you can do in your life?

6. there is a difference between values and wants, which imo mostly has to do with psychological layering—I think values are the deep-seated beliefs and worldviews about “what makes a good life” that make us who we are, whereas wants are the natural extensions of those values + desires internalized via social conditioning—but this is a topic for another time.

7. This applies to you as long as you’re alive.

8. Also, try not to fall for the End-of-history illusion.

The end-of-history illusion is a psychological illusion in which individuals of all ages believe that they have experienced significant personal growth and changes in tastes up to the present moment, but will not substantially grow or mature in the future. Despite recognizing that their perceptions have evolved, individuals predict that their perceptions will remain roughly the same in the future.

But this is a topic for another time.

9. This is really hard to get into in a short article—there are entire books and schools of philosophy dedicated to figuring out what it means to live a life worth living and how to figure that out, and I’ve tried my best to strike a balance between overly prescriptive and too vague to be helpful. Ultimately, the specific thing you’re doing is less important than the idea of trying to live in accordance with your values and be true to yourself.

10. A caveat: sometimes people internalize deep-seated “truths” about themselves, often at a young age or due to trauma. If this is you, I’ll just say this: “uncomfortable” and “unpleasant” are two very different things. As you practice more, you’ll slowly be able to distinguish between feelings that reinforce bad habits (often unpleasant but familiar) and feelings that reach beyond your usual cycles (often strange and terrifying).

I won’t go into the weeds of emotional processing here—that’s a topic for another time—but suffice to say, this stuff will probably make you feel bad and confused at first, because avoiding those emotions until they build up and explode is how you get into a mid- or late-life crisis later on down the line. Try not to overwhelm yourself if possible!