By Rhian Kille, Associate Opinion Editor
The start of a new year is one of my favourite seasons. A time of year dedicated to new beginnings, introspection, and goal-setting is music to the ears of this Virgo. It’s been a couple of months now since we ushered in 2026, but I’m sure I’m not the only one still thinking every day about how I could be more on top of things. This is in part due to the fact that I am now in my final year of university, making me prone to fretting about plans for next year. It is so easy to blindly pile on the pressure in an attempt to seize some level of control over the future. This usually leaves me, pathologically perfectionist and type A, lying in a pile of yellow sticky notes of to-do lists, paralysed for feeling like I’m constantly wasting time. The internet does nothing but encourage my bad behaviour, providing a continuous chorus of what I ‘should’ be doing. This kind of behaviour is encouraged as the pursuit of ‘the good life’, but it creates a life entirely out of balance and void of deeper meaning.
The relentless pressure to improve and optimise ourselves is the bread and butter of neoliberalism, the political and economic ideology favoured by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Neoliberalism thrives on instilling an unwavering faith that the system rewards hard work; if we are just good enough, we will be met with success. This logic pervades beyond economics into all areas of life, generating the demand for an entire self-improvement industrial complex that spans fitness, cosmetics, and social media “gurus”. Constant exposure to this type of content only compounds the mindset that obsessive “productivity” is the price of the life we want.
This line of thinking isn’t quite as easy to dismiss as I might like. On top of the overall state of the economy, the unstable nature of entry-level jobs in most sectors gives young people today due cause to be especially driven, even obsessive. But it rarely stops at professional ambition; recommending an improved work-life balance hardly suffices when ‘life’ feels just as much like work. This is particularly acute to those of us who pine after a career that feels more like a calling; maximising our productivity now is key so that we can live a more fulfilling life in the long run. In the meantime, what do our present-day souls have to run on other than promises of the future?
The self-satisfying pursuits of productivity and self-improvement have, in many ways, adopted the function in our lives traditionally performed by religion. Forms of fanatical reverence for quantified achievement appear in countless modern forms, providing people with a set of guidelines and values through which they can gain routines, rituals and, communities that give their lives a stabilised sense of meaning. We crave the anchoring reassurance we get from tangible successes that we culturally imbue with significance, but this encourages us to rely exclusively on the material as a distraction from abstract anxieties.
Self-optimisation may be the church of the twenty-first century, but being human is so much more than a rat race, a checklist, or a prologue to a fabulous career. Working hard will always be a virtue, but it should not be the default model of structure and meaning, especially when it is divorced from anything larger than yourself. Contemporary uses of manifestation and crystals exemplify how the divine is often now sought out only to the end of achievement. The fixation on the material in place of the metaphysical erodes what people have always known: that there is so much to life beyond what we can see, touch, and metricise.
I love that every year we think of all the ways that we want to be better. New Years resolutions help us clarify what kind of life we want to lead and how we can make the most of our time on Earth. I’m not religious myself, but I think that atheism is too quickly conflated with nihilism. Whether it’s tarot cards, a place of worship, being in nature or with others, tending to our souls, in whatever way feels right to us, is imperative. Rituals, traditions and festivities imbued with spiritual resonance, by us or a religious text, give our lives the meaning and structure that we crave. “Locking in” is not enough to sustain a life of postponed spiritual fulfilment.
Image: Kevin Yudhistira Alloni via Unsplash