But this year she said she doesn’t have the bandwidth even to think about her goals, let alone achieve them. “This January I just want calm, and I want things to be as simple as possible,” she said.
Ms. Robinson feels worn-down by the past three years. “Covid is still here, and now there is R.S.V. and, by the way, the flu is the worst we’ve seen in our entire lives,” she said. In 2022, her youngest child attended in-person school for the first time at the age of 7, which she said was a stressful transition. She also became a first-time homeowner, though she soon ran into a serious plumbing issue. “Buying a house was a goal we had for this year, and we accomplished that, but it came with its own can of worms,” she said.
“What we really need is a chance to pause and process and release the last three years, but we haven’t been given that opportunity because things are coming at us so quickly,” she continued. “Maybe this year we will finally get that, and then we can have a clear slate to move forward.”
Having low expectations, while perhaps sad, can also feel surprisingly refreshing. “There is all this pressure to achieve big things, but maybe it’s better to not eliminate everything you do in your current life and replace it with new habits,” Ms. Robinson said.
Jacob McCleery, who works for a tire retailer in South Bend, Ind., is more worried about a friend who is very enthusiastic about the arrival of the new year. “One of my really dear friends has had a truly awful year, and I know he’s viewing it as, ‘Let’s start over, let’s make a fresh start, let’s make it the best year ever,’” Mr. McCleery, 28, said. “But just because it’s a new year doesn’t mean any emotions you are dealing with, any problems you have aren’t going to carry over.”
“It’s a good mind-set to have, but it’s also a little bit dangerous,” he added.
Mr. McCleery said if the past few years had taught him anything, it was that we have no idea what is on the horizon. “For 2022, everyone had this idea of, ‘We’re in our post-pandemic life now, and this is going to be the year when we would start feeling normal,’” he said. “That’s not what happened at all.”
