Resolutions 2015: Meaningful Reflections and Good thinking

A passive consumer is not a thinker; a quiet reflection is not introspection.

When most people “reflect on themselves”. They meant to observe, to examine, and to assess one’s own state; to make judgment calls of the kind of person you currently are, and whether you are acceptable, according to your standards. In psychology, this is codified in the Self-Discrepancy theory, developed by Edward Tory Higgins in 1987. The kind of person you are now is your Actual self, and the kind of person that meet your standards is your Ideal self. When there is a gap between your actual self and your ideal self, there is a self-discrepancy. You experience tension due to this self-discrepancy, and so become motivated to close that gap, to correct that discrepancy.

The coming of the New Year is a popular time for people to reflect and decide on which aspect of their actual selves to change in order to better resemble their ideal selves. My reflections are done quietly. I look back, feel pleased about my accomplishments, feel bad about my failures, and then plan to do better, and that’s the end of that. For other people, it’s a damn near festival. They make lists about themselves, they declare it online, they discuss it with their friends and family, and they then they set a New Year Resolution, a promise to yourself and to others that you will change. So, I started to wonder, who was doing a better job at reflecting?

What goes on in the mind when we make a resolution? A quick look at many how-to sites give similar steps and instructions, and it could be boiled down into 3 stages:

(1)   Reflection & Comparison

(2)   Goal Formation/Declaration

(3)   Commitment & Motivation

The first step is reflection, obviously. A resolution inherently requires that you reflect on yourself, to determine your Actual and Ideal Self. Are you as attractive as you want to be? Are you as accomplished as you want to be? Are you the person you want to be? These questions are inherently comparative. It is really hard for us to turn it off, to not make judgment calls about ourselves without comparing to the template of our ideal selves. It colors our perceptions and the words we choose to describe ourselves. Two people with very similar characteristics may describe themselves completely differently, because their frame of reference, their templates, are different.

A lot of people, myself included, find resolutions a pointless exercise of a bunch of people making empty promises and then never pursuing them. In a pew study, a whopping 92% of people interviewed admit that they did not achieve their resolution goal for 2014.

It fits with my old worldview; that some ideas are more meaningful than others, and it is judged based on the quality of the thoughts; how well-formed they are and how well-reasoned it is in your head. Just because you had a thought and then you shared it, doesn’t mean it’s a good idea or you had done any meaningful thinking. When I claim that New Year resolutions are pointless ideas, I made a judgment call that those resolutions are not meaningful. I say they are not meaningful because, in my view, nothing is achieved. The people could have easily judged themselves quietly on any other day to equal effect.

Is that true, though?

So the question for me to answer, in order to solve this, is this: “Do people make meaningful reflections of themselves?”

Because I am a fan of tangents and have the attention span of a cocker spaniel, this curiosity leads me to wonder “Well, what constitutes as a meaningful reflection of the self?” Is it the process? How you reflect? Is it the content? What you actually reflect about? Is it the speed? Is the answer that you have painstakingly, slowly come to, more meaningful than one you can conjure up almost immediately?

I spent some time thinking about this question, and I still don’t have a good, confident answer. But I am quite sure that what makes up meaningful reflections also makes a good thought, so maybe we can explore this question by asking “what makes good thinking?”

In any education system, one of the biggest concerns raised is whether the students we are churning out are good thinkers; people who are not only passively absorbing knowledge, but also being aware of that knowledge and using it in a meaningful fashion. Simply using it was not enough, something more was needed to turn the display of knowledge into something meaningful, like wisdom.

Here I want to introduce the term content, the unit of expression of an idea, concept, or schools of thought. A content is chair of a dragon carving, it is an article by a journalist, it is a hilarious Vsauce video, and it is an insignificant blogpost like this. I feel that using the term ‘content’ was appropriate since a lot of insightful pieces of huge ideas come under a larger portfolio, channel or website or collection. This should come into play later.

So what makes a good thought meaningful? Oftentimes, it’s just simply the act of being active with it. I found that one simple design from a carpenter carved on several furniture was much more meaningful, better thinking, than several clever calculus questions that were solved, but why so? I think it’s because the design is an expression of an idea the carpenter had in his mind, and it’s one of the many designs he has under his collection. More importantly though, this content is being actively used. It’s bought and sold, it’s critiqued; criticized and appreciated; it inspires and it evokes response.

In contrast, you don’t find a calculus solution as a meaningful part of a portfolio. It’s a reproduction of a school of thought, but it’s not active. No one critiques it beyond whether it is the right answer, and that’s it.

So the conclusion that I have come to is that being a good thought involves content activity. More specifically, your thinking is only good when it is being active in the world, and the most straightforward way of being active is through producing content.

Content is a very curious commodity, especially in this age of information. It’s not like most goods or services such that it follows the economic rules of demand and supply. It becomes increasingly more valuable, and hence meaningful, as its own demand and supply increases. Why is that so? I think it’s mainly because each piece of content, each unit of the idea is not the same as the other. Each piece of content acts as a complement or a contradiction of each other in a huge picture of an idea, and we, as inherently curious creatures, seek out content in order to figure out the whole picture.

Alright, so where does that leave us? Good thinking involves being active with those thoughts, not passively absorbing them and reproducing them. How does that answer my original question? Am I making better reflections than the people who form an actual resolution?

What I am trying to say is that for the past year, I have been a passive consumer of content and knowledge. I was only absorbing knowledge from really great thinkers and overthinkers alike and playing with what they revealed and sharing it with other people and talking about it, but that is the very poor extent of my intellectual exercise. What made these people insightful and great thinkers in the first place is the fact that they responded to the content they were exposed to and published their content for others to absorb. That means I am saying that the average Youtube Comment will always be 20x more meaningful than even the most profound thoughts I can conjure up silently in my head, and that is saying something, I mean, Yikes, have you seen what anonymous pranksters would write on Youtube?

So if good thinking is defined by the product of your thoughts; the tangible, active content that was generated, I think reflections about yourself should follow the same idea. A reflection about yourself is only meaningful if you have a tangible and active way to express that reflection. Making the comment “I am fat and I want to be thin” to only yourself is meaningless, that comment needs to become tangible and active for it to mean anything as a reflection of yourself.

And I think that is why resolutions are so popular. It’s meaningful, based on my line of reasoning that I have apparently spent days working on. The comments that you make about yourself only gained meaning when you made the resolution and promised yourself that you will try to achieve it. So what if only about a self-reported 8% actually accomplished their resolutions? That is a huge number, compared to the 0% of the group of people who never made a resolution at all! The simple act of declaring your resolution on a day, based on the reflection you have done on yourself, had made it a tangible and active piece of content such that it became meaningful, at least by about 8% more. In a world of 7 billion people and counting, that’s five hundred and sixty million people.

So maybe I haven’t been introspecting enough, and the comments and ideas I have been keeping to myself are about as deep and meaningful and any stray thought. It seems to me, after this exercise, that generating content, of any kind, will always be worth more consideration than the thoughts that I keep to myself.

So what does this mean for me in 2015? For one thing, it means I should really think about how I consume knowledge in the future, and how I think about it. So this year, my resolution is simple: Be more active with my thinking and my ideas.

Thank you for reading my ramble. Happy New Year.