I was having a casual conversation with a friend not too long ago. The kind of conversation that lives somewhere between kopi and confession. She laughed, a little sheepishly, and said she had already ditched part of her New Year resolution. It wasn’t even February yet. And then, just as quickly as the laugh appeared, it slipped away. She told me she felt lousy about it. Like she had already failed the year before it truly began.
What struck me wasn’t that she had “failed” a resolution. It was how quickly that single decision rewired her entire perception of the year ahead. January suddenly felt wasted. February looked suspicious. The rest of the year loomed like a long apology she would need to keep making to herself. All because of a promise made on a date we’ve collectively agreed carries meaning.
There is something quietly cruel about how New Year resolutions work. They arrive dressed as hope, but behave more like ultimatums. Be better. Be thinner. Be calmer. Be more successful. Be more everything—starting now. And when we don’t live up to them, the disappointment doesn’t stay contained to the goal itself. It spills. It stains the mood of the year. It whispers, see, you never follow through.
Somewhere along the way, resolutions stopped being personal intentions and became a kind of social performance. Everyone’s doing it, so you should too. Gym memberships spike in January. Productivity apps advertise “new year, new you.” Social media fills with lists of goals written in confident fonts, as if confidence alone could sustain discipline for twelve months. Psychologists John Norcross and colleagues, who have studied New Year resolutions extensively, found that while many people make them, only a small percentage sustain them long-term. Even among those who do, success tends to be partial, not absolute. Yet culturally, we frame resolutions as all-or-nothing moral victories.
That framing matters. Because when resolutions fail—and many do—they don’t just disappear quietly. They take something with them. Motivation. Self-trust. Sometimes even joy.
What if the problem isn’t that we’re bad at keeping resolutions? What if the problem is the resolution itself?
The idea of compressing an entire year’s worth of growth into a single sentence made on a single day is, when you think about it, absurd. We don’t live our lives annually. We live them weekly. Sometimes hourly. We survive in fragments, not fiscal years. Yet resolutions demand we imagine a version of ourselves twelve months into the future and then hold our present self hostage to that imagined person.
There’s a well-known concept in psychology called the “false hope syndrome,” discussed by psychologist Janet Polivy. It explains how people set unrealistic goals, overestimate their ability to change quickly, and then blame themselves when they fall short. The cycle is familiar: grand intention, early enthusiasm, inevitable obstacle, self-criticism, abandonment. Rinse and repeat, next January.
In that sense, New Year resolutions can become a toxic fad—not because change is bad, but because the way we package change is unsustainable. We mistake ambition for clarity. We confuse scale with seriousness. We think that if a goal isn’t impressive, it isn’t worth having.
This is where I keep returning to a phrase many of us grew up hearing but perhaps stopped trusting: sikit sikit, lama-lama jadi bukit. Little by little, eventually it becomes a hill.
It’s such an unsexy idea. No fireworks. No dramatic before-and-after montage. Just the quiet accumulation of effort. And yet, almost everything meaningful we know works this way. Language acquisition. Fitness. Relationships. Craft. Even confidence. Sociologist James Clear popularised a similar idea in his writing on habit formation, arguing that small, consistent actions compound over time. Neuroscience backs this up too. Research on neuroplasticity shows that repeated small behaviours strengthen neural pathways far more effectively than sporadic bursts of intensity.
But our resolution culture doesn’t reward sikit sikit. It rewards declarations. It wants you to say, “By the end of 2026, I will be a professional seamstress,” not, “In January, I want to learn how to do simple cross-stitching and see if I enjoy it.”
Yet the second statement is far more honest. And kinder.
When we zoom out too far, we lose the plot. The future becomes a performance instead of a process. We stop listening to the present version of ourselves—the one with limited energy, real constraints, and unpredictable life events. Death happens. Illness happens. Burnout happens. None of these ask permission from your resolution list.
Maybe what we need isn’t a resolution, but a practice.
Practices are humble. They don’t promise transformation; they invite participation. You don’t fail a practice—you return to it. The writer Anne Lamott once wrote about “bird by bird,” describing how her father encouraged her brother to take a large, overwhelming task and break it down into manageable pieces. It’s advice that has survived generations because it aligns with how humans actually function.
A monthly or even weekly intention respects reality. It acknowledges fluctuation. Some months you will have energy. Some months you will barely have breath. A weekly practice allows for recalibration without shame. Behavioural scientists like BJ Fogg, from Stanford University, emphasise that habits stick when they are small, emotionally rewarding, and tied to existing routines. Not when they are grand declarations shouted into the void of January 1st.
There’s also something deeply dignifying about letting yourself start small. It resists the capitalist impulse to constantly optimise the self. It says: I am allowed to learn without monetising. I am allowed to try without excelling. I am allowed to be in process.
When my friend told me she felt lousy for ditching her resolution, I wanted to tell her this: you didn’t fail the year. You just discovered, early on, that the promise you made didn’t fit the life you’re living right now. That’s not a flaw. That’s information.
Philosophers have wrestled with this idea long before productivity culture repackaged it. Aristotle spoke about virtue as habit, something cultivated through repeated action rather than a single moral decision. In Eastern philosophy, particularly in Taoist thought, there is an emphasis on flow and alignment rather than force. Even in Islamic tradition, there’s the idea that the most beloved deeds are those done consistently, even if they are small, as mentioned in a hadith reported in Sahih Bukhari and Muslim.
Small does not mean insignificant. Small means sustainable.
Perhaps the kinder question to ask at the start of the year isn’t, “Who do I want to become by December?” but, “What do I want to practice this month?” Or even, “What can I realistically hold gently in my life right now?”
When framed this way, there is less room for self-loathing and more room for curiosity. If January is about learning a basic stitch, February might be about deciding whether sewing even brings joy. March might be about putting it aside altogether, without drama, because interests change and that’s allowed too.
A year does not need to be conquered to be meaningful. It just needs to be lived with some intention and a lot of mercy.
So maybe the problem was never that we lacked discipline. Maybe we just lacked compassion for the human pace. Sikit sikit, lama-lama jadi bukit isn’t a motivational slogan. It’s a reminder that becoming happens quietly, often without witnesses, and rarely on schedule.
And maybe that’s not a failure of resolution—but an invitation to practice instead.
Written by: Adi Jamaludin
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