Evolution of Revolution

It is tempting to think of resolutions as a list made on a single night, under fairy lights and fireworks, then abandoned in the harsh reality of January’s second week. But resolutions, if watched over a lifetime, are less like lists and more like the waistline: each year adds a millimetre or centimetre, or even a few inches, of intention, compromise, and experience to us. A resolution is not only what we promise to do; it is what we believe about choice, about time, about who we are and whom we might still become.

The twenties delulu. In youth, resolutions often arrive dressed as certainty. At eighteen or twenty-two, resolutions are grand declarations: never settling, always choosing passion, refusing and many times even knowledge of the compromises. They are extravagant because they are made in a context where time feels infinite, the consequences distant. At that age, you believe the self-help slogans/ influencers that insist that anything is possible, that the universe will rearrange itself around the intensity of your desire. A resolution is less a plan than a costume you put on, a performance of the person you intend to be.

But even at that stage, there can be quiet ruptures: the student who resolves never to return to their small town but finds themselves back there caring for a parent; the young colleague who swore they would never chase money and now jumps jobs for little benefits. It happens through that exam you couldn’t crack, the admission acceptance that never showed up, the job interview you didn’t get, that first job that wasn’t quite as expected. The first cracks in resolution are often read as personal failure, not as the ordinary collision between individual will and structural reality. Yet it is precisely in those collisions that resolution begins to change from performance into practice.

The disillusioned commitments. In early adulthood, say the late twenties and thirties, life acquires edges. There is rent to be paid, work that extends into evenings, the dull but relentless arithmetic of EMIs and sometimes school fees, of aging parents and the daily labour of partnership. Resolutions of this period are smaller on the surface but heavier in weight: to be home for dinner three nights a week, to save a certain modest amount, to hit the gym because the body has begun to whisper its limits. Here, resolution is no longer a proclamation shouted into the future; it is a negotiation with the present.

This is the stage where institutions tighten their grip. Workplaces demand more visibility and productivity, families lean on the most “responsible” member, and social roles become scripts that are hard to rewrite. Many people discover that their resolutions are not merely about self-discipline but about resisting or rearranging these scripts. To resolve to leave the office on time is to push, however gently, against a culture that glorifies overwork. To resolve to share care work at home is to question gendered expectations embedded in generations. Resolution, then, becomes a small instrument of dissent, a way of insisting that life can be lived differently even when structures suggest otherwise.

This is the era of disillusionment and, if one is lucky, of a more grounded kind of hope. The belief that ‘everything is possible’ gives way to the awareness that ‘some doors will close forever’. At the same time, there is a growing sense that the measure of a life is not how many doors were available, but how deeply one lived in the rooms that were chosen. Resolutions become less about collecting experiences and more about deepening commitments: to a craft, a community, a career path, a relationship, a set of values that can withstand adversity.

The reality check. By midlife, somewhere in the forties and fifties, resolutions bear the imprint of loss. Careers have plateaued or bent in unexpected directions; relationships have ruptured or been reconfigured; the body has issued its non-negotiable ultimatums. For many, this is the time of the “reality check” that feels less like a gentle nudge and more like a roadside crash. A medical report, a redundancy letter, a sudden bereavement: these events reorder the hierarchy of resolutions overnight. What seemed urgent - promotion, praise, bonus,  - shrinks against the simple desire to move as one desires without pain, to have one more un-hurried, un-burdened,  un-purposeful conversation.

At this stage, the resolution often becomes modest in language but radical in meaning. Midlife resolution is less fascinated with reinvention and more concerned with repair. There is a philosophical pivot from “What can I make of my life?” to “How can I live faithfully within the life I have?”

The social landscape shifts, too. The midlife person stands torn with opposing requirements: children growing outward into their own experiments and parents narrowing into fragility; colleagues younger and quicker on the edges and mentors vanishing from the top. Resolution becomes an act of stewardship because other lives are now tethered to one’s reliability. To keep a resolution about rest or boundaries is no longer self-indulgence; it is an investment in the capacity to show up for others.

Choosing Depth over Breadth. And then, if time grants it, there is later life. Resolutions in one’s sixties, seventies, and beyond often abandon the drama of transformation. To resolve anything at all, in a body that has withstood decades and in a world that has changed beyond recognition, is to adopt an attitude rather than a target. These are not the resolutions of someone trying to be someone else; they are the resolutions of someone intent on remaining themselves in the face of diminishment.

Older people navigate a culture that alternately romanticises and erases them. In some families and communities, elders are consulted for everyday decisions. In others, they are gently exiled into the margins of relevance. Resolutions here may include a refusal to disappear: to keep writing, teaching, mentoring, showing up at protests, voting, telling stories that younger people have not yet heard. Or they may be quieter: tending a garden, keeping a circle of friends alive, recording family histories so that memory does not die with the body.

This is the season when resolution and acceptance become almost indistinguishable. To resolve to live each day as it comes is not passivity but a practice that recognises the dwindling horizon and chooses depth over breadth. The young make resolutions to shape the future; the old make resolutions to meet the present with as much grace as they can gather. The young imagine who they might become; the old safeguard who they have become from the corrosion of fear and regret.

Across these ages and stages, the evolution of resolution tells a quieter story about freedom and constraint. In early life, the story is that of unbounded choice; in midlife, of choice within constraint; in later life, of how to respond when much is no longer a choice at all. So many broken resolutions are not evidence of weakness but of learning: learning what matters, what is possible, and what must be relinquished so that something else can live.

The most honest resolution at any age is not a list of behaviours but a question one carries into the year: Given who I am and where I stand, what would it mean to live more truthfully? The answers will differ wildly between an eighteen-year-old and a seventy-year-old, between someone with inherited security and someone one hospital call away from being. But the act of asking is itself a kind of resolution, a commitment to remain awake to one’s own life as it unfolds, unpredictable yet always finite.

If resolutions begin as mirrors in which we admire an imagined self, they mature into windows through which we see our entanglement with others, with institutions and with the fragile conditions that make us. To track the evolution of our resolutions is to track the evolution of our understanding of freedom: from “I can do anything” to “I cannot do everything” to “I will do this, with care, while I can.”