Resolutions and the Hungry Ghost Podcast Transcript
Resolutions and The Hungry Ghost
This is the transcript first of a three part podcast of a series on Resolutions, Intentions, and serious behavior change. There are some edits (not enough, I fea).
Lead in
I have a jaded relationship with resolutions, which I guess means I have a jaded relationship with January, [chuckles] and upcoming to January every year. It’s because of the idea of resolutions, like this is something we’re supposed to do, that we have to do. In my opinion, there’s a number of approaches to making changes, and resolutions is certainly one of the very biggest. And in my sense, it’s almost equivalent to attempting to thrust change down our throats and then wishing we had a stomach pump. [chuckles] Three weeks in, and many of us have already abandoned our resolutions, our goals, our efforts to reduce our food intake, or whatever it is. Another common approach to making changes is intentions, and I think this is like a version of mindfulness. Uh, it’s like resolutions with wrapping paper, [chuckles] so you’re supposed to feel so much better about it. And then there’s what I’ve come up with in a lot of cases, and that’s I just give up and don’t care. Well, frankly, I’m not sure that’s the best answer either. I’m not happy with any of them. And so for this episode and two others following, we’re gonna be talking about how do we make sense of personal change? How do we look ourselves in the mirror in the morning and the evening, and feel at peace a little bit with who we are and what we’re trying to do with our lives? How do we kind of live in a world of better alignment? And this episode is called The Hungry Ghost: Why Resolution Brain Fails Us. Hi, I’m Mike Davis, and you’re listening to Worldwide Stew. If you scratch beneath the surface of life, there’s always a simmering pot of big personal ideas and stories, and that’s how we got from there to here. And if we look hard enough, we discover timeless truths that help us flourish. Worldwide Stew surfaces stories about people, places, things, and universal concepts that connect us all. You might be surprised by how much we all share. Welcome to Worldwide Stew. I’m your host, Mike Davis. I think all of us want to feel like we can succeed, like we have a purpose for living, that we are not broken, that, yes, we can establish goals and make our way through them and feel confident about making a difference in our lives. But it seems that this metaphor of making resolutions, it’s a timeworn tradition marking the transition to the beginning of a new year. And usually, in these cases, we focus on our deficits, the things where we feel like failures, and then we create a laundry list of needed changes. And, and the thing is, and this is so disturbing and unethical from my point of view, and I mean unethical, if we listen to advertisers, our deficits almost literally turn into a shopping list. Who we are wasn’t good enough, so voila, we’ve bought a laundry list of things or apps that we’ve been told will help us one hundred percent to feel better about ourselves. And when these– when we see the ads on television, everybody’s dancing and running around and smiling and obviously having the time of our lives, or when we go to Facebook, we hear about the incredible accomplishments of people we admire. [sighs] So we climb onto the sideshow of resolutions, and off we go, and within a very short period of time, usually, resolutions fall by the wayside. I gave up on resolutions years ago. Building resolutions based on my failings always led to an even greater sense of failure. And something that’s really important in this is that my sense that my failings was built on my experience as a child, as a society, living within a society that had certain expectations of weight, height, happiness, all of these kinds of things. So I build my, uh, list of resolution, my laundry list, on, on these kinds of things…. and that’s a really important, and I hope you’ll kind of keep that in mind, ‘cause that’s gonna become important. So I discover– I was like: Why do this to myself? Why would I, why would I increase the sense of pain that I have, knowing that my resolutions have more than a small chance of failing? And in case you think you’re better than me in this respect, many studies suggest that resolution brain, as I’m gonna call it, often leads to less confidence and more depression. So why did I do that to myself? I concluded, “Why even mess with this?” So I want you, I hope, I invite you, please, to stay with me for just a moment. \
Read more...