And the thing is — everything is changing: how we communicate with one another, how we think about ourselves, how we think about job prospects, how we even think about what constitutes success. And even good change is hard.

We aspire by doing things, and the things we do change us so that we are able to do the same things, or things of that kind, better and better. In the beginning, we sometimes feel as though we are pretending, play-acting, or otherwise alienated from our own activity. We may see the new value as something we are trying out or trying on rather than

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Eventually, I stopped making resolutions altogether. Not because I stopped wanting change—but because I stopped trying to become someone else. The desire to work on myself never went away. It simply lost its appetite for spectacle. And so, in place of resolutions, I turned toward ritual.

Rituals are gentler than resolutions. Where resolutions chase... See more