By Abak Hussain
Why are New Year’s resolutions so hard to keep? And why does the hope for a better tomorrow seem to slowly bleed out of us as we get older – replaced by a weary cynicism of nothing-will-change and it’s-all-the-same-just-you-wait-and-see?
It is no accident that the seismic political and cultural event we witnessed in July of this year is being called a Gen Z revolution, not a Boomer revolution. Because the more that you bring to the table in terms of your long view of history, sometimes the less useful you are. What you bring is baggage, and not what is needed in the here and now. Habit and repetition can ossify our wisdom, blinding us to possibilities.
Allow me a bit of a highbrow detour – Marcel Proust, in his 4,000-word song of the soul In Search of Lost Time, returns again and again to the topic of habit. We are, all of us, slaves to the grooves of habit, and this affects not just our mundane day-to-day activities, but our view of the Big Things – life, love, art, politics. But every now and then, a new point of view breaks through the surface tension and all that is around us appears new once again – the church spires visible from your window, the play of light and shadow on a random patch of ground, the trail right outside your house strewn with hawthorns. In a world where our experiences are dulled by habit, what we really need, Proust shows us, are not just superficial novelties but new eyes. With new eyes, everything becomes new again, and a patch of sunlight falling on your own garden rooftop – a sight by now too familiar to even register in the brain – can once again make you delirious with joy.
Many of us do realize habits make us sleepwalk through life, but there is little we can do about it. This is just the way the human brain evolved, geared towards survival – we notice only things that are out of the ordinary. Because if things today look pretty much like they did yesterday, the brain says: this ain’t my first rodeo, and goes on autopilot. The upside is that you are conserving energy, but the catastrophic downside is you are forever trapped in a groove, and if the situation that appears to you ordinary is in fact a bad situation, then you have normalized an undesirable situation and will have stopped looking for a way to bust out of it. If the lack of fundamental human rights, such as the right to privacy or freedom of speech feels as normal to you as water is to fish, you will no longer bother fighting to gain those things. Grooves of habit breed resignation and acceptance.
So coming back to the original question: Why are New Year’s resolutions so hard to keep? As weary veterans of many failed battles, we already know that old patterns will defeat us, and the youthful optimism that once told us that starting tomorrow morning things will change – well, that optimism is long gone and our failure is something we feel in our brittle bones. Our resolutions will have failed before they have even started, as a cynical voice says to us: What makes this new calendar year different from last year?
This time though, as a nation, we really are welcoming in a New Year and not just as a meaningless bit of date-changing. In July we toppled a government that had held on to power continuously for 15 years, a government that not only plundered the country of its wealth and made a mockery of human rights, but also built a narrative centring around a cult of personality, while microphones blared ruling-party propaganda into our ears. Like the hapless Winston in George Orwell’s 1984, our brains and our bodies were beaten within an inch of their lives, and to many, especially the older crowd, positive change seemed impossible. In the oppressive backdrop of authoritarianism, on an individual level we could still find joy in the Proustian moments. The simple pleasure of a bite of your favorite dessert can transport you in an instant to a childhood moment, which was perhaps the last time you were genuinely happy. But sooner or later, that thing on your neck, by which I mean the boot of regime, snaps you out of your daydream. Like Winston, you begin to accept the fact that resistance is futile. That maybe the only way forward is – like the legions of sycophants and regime lackeys seem to have understood – to learn to love Big Brother.
And then, out of this impossibility, descends an unstoppable force. Young people, many of them not yet out of their school uniforms, risk police abuse or even death to fight for justice. Their naïve dream is to oust an autocrat who will do anything and everything to cling to power. If the crystallized wisdom of our elders failed us, the new eyes of the youth may save us yet. We just need to let them. After all, Gen Z earned their turn at the driver’s seat.
As we turn over a new leaf and move into a New Year, it is tempting to fall back into the clichés that held us back for so long. But bad habits don’t break easy, and here in Bangladesh, our national, bureaucratic, and civic habits are really, really bad, and they will be really, really hard to break. Just imagine, here was a patient on their last legs still refusing to quit smoking or get exercise. It is tempting to give up on such a hopeless patient. But Gen Z has the energy to really interrogate those habits and work towards finding a new groove. The members of the League of It-Was-Better-Before will continue to try to create chaos and try to send us back. Many who were not even beneficiaries of the corrupt regime will still feel a toxic love for them, like an abuse victim inextricably tied to their abuser in a trauma bond. But the possibilities for the New Year are so much more than what we have already seen in the past. The true possibilities encompass all that we can imagine.
We just need the eyes to see those possibilities. Happy New Groove!
Abak Hussain is Contributing Editor at MW Bangladesh
