"New Year, New You" Rhetoric Has Begun Again. We Can Do Better Than This.

I dread media this time of year. It’s predictable and almost always the same, with headlines like:

• “New Year, New You: 7 Habits to Become Your Best Self in 2026,” or…

• "The One Routine Change That Will Transform Your Productivity This Year," or...

• “5 Essential New Year’s Resolutions to Reset Your Life,” or…

• “Get Off Your Ass, Lazy: ‘Lessons’ from Our Advertisers to Get You to Buy Services and Products to Fill the Void in Your Soul from Late-Stage Capitalism.”

Okay, the last one may not really be a headline. (Okay, it’s definitely not.) But you get the gist.

Every January, we’re met across traditional and new media with a steady stream of articles, ads, and videos about how we need to improve ourselves: work more efficiently and harder, lose weight, get stronger, make more money, practice self-care better. Conveniently, these messages almost always come bundled with apps, products, and services designed to help us do exactly that.

It's a lot of "you're not enough" messaging, enticing you to buy things that will "miraculously" solve this problem, and if it's not successful, it's your fault. No worries, though, we'll have the same advice and new-and-improved products and services for you to buy starting January 2nd of next year.

Do I need some kind of post-holiday reset? Absolutely. However, for me, that usually looks like getting back to where I was before several weeks of delicious indulgence and not picking myself apart to try to rebuild myself into something new.

The Cult of Self-Improvement Culture

As a recovering perfectionist, I resist these annual improvement campaigns not only on principle, but because the research is clear: most New Year’s resolutions don’t work. People abandon them within weeks or months. Sustainable change tends to be slower, messier, and far less dramatic than January media would have us believe.

Look more for sustainable life-changes and use the research from the work of habit-changing to build towards those goals...and remember you can work on these changes at any time of the year. Building a new habit takes time. You may falter, but give yourself grace, try to learn from what didn't work before, and give it another go.

All that being said, my resistance to this rhetoric goes deeper than skepticism about resolutions.

Capitalism, Neoliberalism, and the Commodification of the Self

The language of self-improvement is deeply shaped by capitalism, particularly the commodification of the worker. In a system organized around productivity, growth, and extraction, people are valued primarily for what they produce. Time, energy, bodies, attention, and even emotions become resources to be managed in service of output. Self-improvement rhetoric frames human beings as projects that can be optimized: more efficient, more resilient, more adaptable, more profitable. When exhaustion sets in or something stops working, the assumption is not that the system is demanding too much, but that the individual needs to upgrade through better habits, better tools, better discipline.

Neoliberalism provides the ideological glue that makes this logic feel natural. It insists that individuals are primarily responsible for managing the outcomes of their lives, regardless of the structural conditions they’re operating within. Within this framework, success and failure are understood as entirely personal achievements or personal shortcomings, rather than as outcomes shaped by power, policy, labor markets, and institutional design.

Don’t have time to make nutritious meals? That’s a personal failure of planning or discipline — not a reflection of long work hours, caregiving responsibilities, food deserts, or chronic stress.

Can’t get more done in the workday? That’s a productivity problem — not a sign that workloads are unrealistic, boundaries are punished, or constant availability has become normalized.

Feeling exhausted, overwhelmed, or behind? That’s something to fix about yourself—not a rational response to economic precarity, institutional instability, or a culture that treats rest as a reward rather than a requirement.

This framing is incredibly effective because it individualizes what are fundamentally structural problems. It keeps attention focused inward — on habits, mindsets, resolutions, and hacks — while larger questions about power, labor, and inequality remain untouched.

People are quietly reduced to units of human capital. We are expected to be smart, efficient, adaptable, and visibly healthy (which often means superficial metrics of levels of thinness and toned muscles, not actually what's going on within our bodies) so we can remain productive for as long as possible.

Furthermore, the lure of an article about how to make more money is often done with the understanding that not only with the article or video get more profitable clicks (because who isn't financially struggling right now), but also with the knowledge that with increased wages/salaries comes "lifestyle creep" -- in other words, more spending money on products and services.

How This Takes Shape within the Academe

It's easy to see how these dynamics operate within our larger society and the corporate sphere. Academia is not outside these dynamics. Despite its self-image as a space of intellectual autonomy, it has become deeply entangled with capitalist and neoliberal logics: productivity metrics, competition for scarce funding, contingent labor, and constant evaluation. Scholars are trained into this way of thinking early. Grant deadlines, publication counts, teaching evaluations, and the pressure to be visibly productive teach academics to interpret structural constraints as personal failures. When something isn’t working, the reflex is rarely to question the system. You think the problem is you, and the reflex is to self-correct.

Over time, this produces a deeply managerial relationship to the self. People — especially academics — learn to monitor their own performance, correct inefficiencies, and override their limits in order to remain viable within the system. That posture doesn’t disappear when you leave academia. It follows you into other sectors, into job searches, into rest, and into how you talk to yourself when you feel behind.

The corporatization of higher education and the “publish or perish” mentality operate on the same capitalist mindset: constant output, delayed reward, and self-worth measured through productivity metrics. Many of us internalize these logics long before we ever question them.

But we are more than this. We are people, not projects or products. And I refuse to be fully commodified within these systems — and I hope you will, too.

From Self-Improvement to "Decommodified Selfhood"

This is where I find the distinction between self-improvement and what I call "decommodified selfhood" useful. I define "decommodified selfhood" as a non-extractive way of relating to yourself, one that resists capitalist and neoliberal demands to turn your time, body, energy, and ambition into ongoing sources of value extraction.

By that, I mean relating to yourself in ways that are not organized primarily around productivity, performance, or market value. It’s a refusal to see every moment of rest as inefficiency, every hesitation as weakness, or every interest as wasted potential unless it can be monetized. It’s stepping out of the logic that says your worth must always be proven through output.

This doesn’t mean opting out of work, responsibility, or ambition. It means recognizing that we’ve been trained —especially in professional settings, including academia — to relate to ourselves as assets. We monitor, evaluate, correct, and discipline ourselves in ways that mirror how institutions and markets evaluate us. Over time, that managerial posture becomes internalized, even when the external structures change.

Decommodified selfhood asks something quieter and more difficult: what does it look like to make decisions, set goals, and move through the world without constantly translating yourself into metrics? What does it mean to take your own limits, needs, and signals seriously in a system that benefits from you ignoring them?

Practicing Decommodified Selfhood

If you want to approach this year differently, here are a few ways to begin practicing decommodified selfhood—without turning it into another list of things you’re failing to do.

• Ask why New Year’s resolutions feel compelling right now. Is there something specific you want to change, or are you responding to a flood of messaging about who you’re supposed to be at the start of a year? If resolutions genuinely work for you, that’s fine. Our goal here is to be critical about whether you’re doing them because they make sense for you, or because you feel pressure to demonstrate that you’re a “good” person (read: productive, disciplined, constantly improving).

• Notice where you default to self-blame. Especially around time, energy, and capacity. When something feels hard or impossible, pause before assuming the problem is you. (This is not to say we do not have any agency, but we often have less than we think...) Ask what structural conditions — workload, precarity, caregiving, institutional expectations — might also be shaping what’s possible.

• Treat fatigue and hesitation as information. Does this mean you have been doing too many late nights working and need to take a few days to restore? Does your hesitation indicate that your plate is too full and you need to say no to this new ask someone has of you?

• Define sustainability on your own terms. It's not about what you can survive or push through, but what you can maintain without resentment, depletion, or constant self-negotiation.

• Practice relating to yourself without constant evaluation. This often feels uncomfortable at first — especially if you’ve been trained to monitor, assess, and correct yourself at all times. Learn to value yourself for your personality traits and interests and not for how "valuable" you are as an academic or an employee.

• Look for collective solutions, not just individual fixes. Individual coping strategies matter, but structural problems require collective responses. That might mean talking with colleagues about workload norms, supporting graduate student or contingent faculty organizing, or joining a union such as the American Association of University Professors, or, if you are in a non-academic setting, a union within your sector.

None of this fits neatly into a resolution or a 30-day challenge. That’s part of the point. Decommodified selfhood takes shape over time, in small and consistent decisions. It shows up in self-awareness and self-care within systems that rarely care for you the way that they should.

And honestly? That feels like a much better way to begin a year.

Looking for support in navigating your career journey? Let’s chat — it’s free, and you’ll walk away with actionable steps to start your journey.

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© 2026 Marya T. Mtshali. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission from the author.