Stirring Point

A neuroscientist I follow recently committed to a resolution to live 2025 like it was his last year on earth. Morbid? Daunting? A little extreme? Yes, yes, yes. But caveats abound. It wasn’t about tossing away all responsibility in the face of a ticking clock. He’s not attempting to live some maximalist version of life for the next year. Rather, he framed the process around what he plans to cut out of his days to free up more minutes. Preoccupations have been robbing him of joy, and it was time to crop the clutter. Finality is the ultimate spotlight, and the mere idea of it—even tucked into a thought experiment—can nudge us a little closer to what actually matters.

The new year is a starting block for new beginnings, but as life tangles your laces and hides a shoe, simply finding the starting line is hard enough. (I realize my running analogy is imperfect, but let’s keep going.)  Effort and consistency are monsters to maintain, and to ease their resistance, it often helps to lighten our load. We run faster when we take our keys from our pockets, leave our wallets in the console and peel off unneeded layers. 

If you too were to cut out the dead weight of hindering preoccupations, what would fall first? This isn’t about quitting your job or refusing to pay bills. I’m referencing the smaller moments in the day that cake mud on your shoes and slow you down. Will getting rid of some of these add a few ounces of pure happiness to your life? What would that look like?

Maybe it starts with taking Sundays off from Instagram or refusing to finish books you don’t enjoy. What if you ditched the doomscroll of the modern newsfeed on Fridays? Will turning off the TV at 9 p.m. gain you an extra hour of sleep? How can you lighten your load just a touch to free up slivers of a happier self?

This isn’t Lent, and I’m not suggesting you swear off the cookies. But thinking about what activities are costing you good calories may allow you to allocate your energy elsewhere. What people in your life cause you more strife than good? When does “no” become the right answer for those relationships?

Homing in on life’s most important aspects requires recognizing what fails to serve you and excising it from your day. In the weeks ahead, we’ll watch resolutions fall like trees in a windstorm, powerless to stand against the push of resistance. We too may lose momentum for the new habits we’ve started. But we can still add through subtraction by removing the junk and regaining minutes. If we do this enough, those minutes will inevitably start adding up.

Attempting to live 2025 like it’s our last year on earth is an interesting concept but an enormous ask of our psychology. You won’t find your author assuming this mantel, but there will be a “trimming” of the acts that fail to serve him. The cost is low, the gain is high, and the byproduct is more time for the good stuff that moves us. And lord knows, we can all use a little more time.