New Year’s Squeeze

The last day of the year always seems to carry with it a vague, buzzing pressure. 

What begins in late November and early December as an eager invitation to a blank slate slowly mutates into something else as January 1 looms large. It’s a little like when you crack open a fresh journal—the Notebook That’s Going to Change Everything™—committed to using nicer handwriting this time, only to sit there frozen over the page, pen hovering, nervously humming Natasha Bedingfield’s “Unwritten.” (Just me?)

For me, the vibe always shifts a day or two into the holiday break. I skidded into our company’s off-week this year frazzled and overwhelmed, my sanity duct-taped together after a few challenging months, wondering, How am I going to fix everything that’s wrong with my life in the next seven days so I can have a clean slate for 2024? 

There were complicated drafts I’d been procrastinating on, lingering emails with questions about the future I wasn’t ready to answer yet, and, of course, the neurotic litany of goal-setting and reflection processes I subject myself to every year (whether this is driven by narcissism, self-loathing, or a dizzying cocktail of both, we’ll never know—that’s showbiz, baby). 

Regardless, the promise of a tabula rasa in the future feels like purification. But when you’re staring that promise in the face? When you open the glistening, unblemished page in your new $29 Moleskine and it’s time to write your first entry? Planning to be somebody and being somebody are different jobs.

Part of the voluntary shame of this process is the pesky memory of all the first pages that came before: the budgets carefully manicured then discarded the moment we discovered our desires didn’t fit inside them, the earnest devotion to reasonable screen time limits bypassed in mindless, repetitive 15-minute increments, the pledges to meditate every morning promptly abandoned as soon as the first frantic 6am Slack message of the new year arrived. 

It’s humiliating and endearing, the way we return to the altar of our goals and plans, ready to suffer our penance and re-up. The cynics among us gave up on this ritual long ago, but the naive optimists? We can’t help ourselves.

To call my typical end-of-year review process “achievement-oriented” would be generous. It’s been focused—narrowly and obsessively—on money and career progress since 2020. I’d go through the motions of setting personal goals (screen time! meditation! books!), but my heart wasn’t in it. 

“I don’t know,” I’d write in the spiritual or family or relationships sections, “Maybe I’ll call my parents more. Anyway, back to Forbes 30 Under 30!” I’d write, reanimated and foaming at the mouth over a meaningless list and its honorees, many of whom were cautionary tales so possessed by ambition that their drive turned them into felons. 

While the self-imposed pressure to make the annual turnover meaningful is uncomfortable, I think we feel it because we accurately judge the stakes to be high. We might get a fresh start every year, but our years are not unlimited. The desire to do right by ourselves is natural; healthy, even. 

Part of this onerous ritual for me each year involves rereading all of my journal entries from the last 365 days. Since my birthday is on December 22, I get the double-whammy of turning another year older right before the calendar changes over (I like to think I was early to Capricorn season because, well, you know). It’s a valuable exercise to digest a full year’s worth of the things I felt strongly enough to write about in the moment, because themes tend to emerge.

During my review of 2023’s goals, I noticed something: At the beginning of the year, I had intended to avoid corners of the internet that made me feel shitty, like Elon’s radioactive social experiment. I had intended to start my day more thoughtfully and to avoid catastrophizing and spiraling. I had intended to spend more time making things, and less time consuming them. Compared to my financial and career goals, these were footnotes. Asterisks. On your way to making a million dollars, I seemed to write, can you also cut down on doom-scrolling?

So imagine my surprise in reading back through the journal and finding entries about my phone creating anxiety, waffling about how to start my day (“Kinda wanna work out, kinda wanna just start working, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll shower;” girl, just pick one), and—what else?—some good, old-fashioned spiraling. 

This was, strangely, comforting. It was like staring at a roadmap to myself. Oh, I thought, I’m sitting here making lists of income and net worth goals, when the real needle movers are right in front of me. On a day-to-day basis, there were strikingly few entries about money. For how much emphasis the subject received in my goals, it was almost entirely absent from my journal entries. There was plenty of hand wringing about my creative process and business decisions and long-term dreams, but the dollars and cents of it all never really entered the plot. 

Maybe it’s because it had been a focus for so many years that there wasn’t much else to say, or maybe it’s because once you reach a certain satiation point, further focus feels beside the point. Or maybe it’s that the dollars and cents of it all were never really the point. 

It didn’t take a close reading to reveal that brute-forcing my way through more work, rather than creating the space necessary to make that work good—might’ve been self-defeating. (After all, as I reviewed my 2023 treatise, manic in its loftiness, I couldn’t ignore that I’d met neither the net worth nor the income goals I had set. All that emphasis—and for what? Even the approach that prioritized financial and career success above all else didn’t produce the intended results—financial or otherwise—so maybe the approach wasn’t serving me as much as I had thought.) 

Of course, I’m still Money with Katie—so that’s not to say I don’t have any financial or career goals for 2024. Just that their weight has been right-sized among the things that I’d historically ignored, the things that clearly had a larger influence on my day-to-day satisfaction than the second decimal point of a savings rate or an arbitrary net worth threshold.

And I don’t know—maybe it’s the optimism <> narcissism cocktail talking, but something tells me my approach this year might be the one that Finally Changes Everything.

How have your goals changed this year? Send us an email at moneywithkatie@morningbrew.com and let us know.