My This-is-NOT-A-Year-End-Post

Un-advice, Un-lessons, Un-resolutions and Un-goals for 2025

It’s the last day of 2024. I have a confession to make. I disdain end-of-year or year-in-review social media posts. Soon they will be flooding the internet. So as an act of defiance, this is my… this-is-not-a-year-end-post.

There are 5 reasons why I’m NOT doing an end-of-year article:

1. I’m not up for appeasing the social media gods

On December 31st you’re supposed to post an end-of-year article. It’s just what you do. It’s expected. The social media gods require this. There’s a lot of pressure - it’s your 2024 swan song and it’s competing with everyone else’s year-end farewell. You don’t want to drop a dud and fail the digital deities. No worries, there’s help for crafting your defining year-end literary work. In one such article I read:

“Start by going through your calendar, looking at what you did, and marking all of the important dates. Then write a narrative around those events, you can get as creative as you like with your storytelling… A year is often marked by highs and lows. For example, this year I had the second-worst migraine I’ve ever had. A personal review allows you to look back with grace and distance at what’s taken place over the past 365 days, the good and the bad.”

I think I had my third-worst migraine reading that article! The first-worst was watching the Detroit Lions lose the Super Bowl, and the second-worst was learning that John Wick 5 was cancelled. This past year I suffered the worst lower back pain of my life from a degenerative disc, but why would I tell you about it? I also had a There’s Something About Mary incident (if you know what I mean), but I don’t plan on blabbing about that.

I get it. If someone wants to write a year-end article, it’s all good. Some of them I truly enjoy reading. It’s not my intent to offend anyone. But as for me - nope, I’m not doing it. And one big reason is knowing that I’m supposed to.

For too many years I lived my life according to the “thou shalts” and “shalt nots” of society and religion, which proved to be disastrous. I was a card-carrying people-pleaser. Rather than questioning the status quo, thinking for myself and consciously directing my life from the inside out, I played according to their rules. I listened to every authority except my own soul.

In Wall and Piece, Banksy wrote, “The greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people breaking the rules but by people following the rules.” He has a point, right? To understand his assertion, perhaps read my article on Banksy. Oscar Wilde wrote, “Disobedience is man’s original virtue.” Progress is often made through defiance - sometimes in epic ways like Martin Luther King, Jr. and civil disobedience, and sometimes in personal ways like you and I courageously choosing the life we want.

I admit having defiant and contrarian inclinations, and there are occasions when this can get in the way. But in my view, it requires disobedience to become a whole person. This past week in my new series on the psychology of religion, I wrote an article on the work of Carl Jung. One of Jung’s central concepts is “individuation”, which he identified as the purpose of life’s journey. Jungian psychoanalyst, James Hollis, wrote:

“The hero in each of us is required to answer the call of individuation. We must turn away from the cacophony of the outerworld to hear the inner voice. When we can dare to live its promptings, then we achieve personhood. We may become strangers to those who thought they knew us, but at least we are no longer strangers to ourselves.”

Consider the possibility that you may be living someone else’s life; that is, following a script that was programmed into your head, but not consciously or freely chosen by yourself. STOP! Ask yourself: Is this the life I want to be living? Is this the person I want to be? Is my life an expression of what truly and deeply matters most to me?

A couple additional questions worth asking would be:

• What are the dictums that religion or society have programmed into my head that I should stop following?

• What rules am I obeying that I should break?

Walt Whitman wrote, “Re-examine all you have been told. Dismiss what insults your soul.” In what ways are you being forced or expected to live a life that is an insult to your soul - your values, your convictions, your highest truth?

It requires courage and determination to create the life you want because it is likely antithetical to what you’ve been told you “should” be or do. If consciously directing and living your own life was easy, everyone would be doing it. However, there are more and more people waking up and living self-directed lives, and you will discover these people as you go.

Start where you are. What would it mean for you to more consciously create the life you want to live? What are some concrete steps and tangible actions you can take in that direction? What would it mean for you to begin listening, following and honoring what most deeply resonates with your heart and spirit about the person who want to be and the life you want to live?

Have compassion on yourself. Choosing to live a self-directed and conscious life isn’t always rainbows and ponies. Expect resistance. Change isn’t easy.

2. I’m not up for looking back

I really don’t want to re-hash 2024. Some parts of it I’d rather quite forget. It was like every other year - filled with joys and sorrows, tragedies and triumphs, record lows and record highs. For me personally, aspects of 2024 were extraordinary, outstanding and magnificent, some of it totally sucked, and most of it isn’t worth writing home about.

In Cannery Row John Steinbeck wrote, “Men all do about the same thing when they wake up.” There are 8 billion human beings on the planet. We don’t like the idea that most of us are engaged in common everyday endeavors and tasks. We feel the need to prove to ourselves and others that our lives are superior, special, and noteworthy.

There was a thought experiment that Friedrich Nietzsche used to challenge people to examine the kind of life they were living. He called it “eternal Recurrence.” Nietzsche wrote:

“What if this life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you.”

To put into context here, what if you had to live every detail of your 2024 all over again?

Another concept from Nietzsche was “amor fati” - the love of fate or the love of one’s fate. Nietzsche saw it as flawed thinking to divide up one’s life into two categories of “good” (joys, comforts, successes, delight, pleasure, gratification) and “bad” (hardship, difficulty, adversity, sorrow, loss, affliction). Nietzsche said that the human journey involves all of the above, and that we should not celebrate the good and despise the bad, but cultivate an acceptance and even an appreciation for the totality of it all, and how the spectrum of all our life experiences contribute to our becoming more liberated, profound and actualized human beings.

Nietzsche was raised in a Christian family and his father was a pastor. There was hope that Nietzsche would follow in these steps. But ultimately Nietzsche denounced religion and Christianity, and believed that the emerging scientific view of the world made belief in God unreasonable, hence his infamous “God is dead” quote (which I previously wrote an article about).

Nietzsche rejected the Christian view that human hardship and difficulty is a curse and consequence of sin, not part of God’s perfect plan, and will ultimately be eradicated by God, at least for those who are approved by God for heaven in the afterlife.

Nietzsche offered in place of this, the cultivation of a love for all of life and the recognition that all of life provides the raw materials from which we become more fully what we are. Nietzsche wanted human beings to look at the totality of everything their life contained - the “good” and the “bad” - and to love all of it.

Nietzsche wrote:

“My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, but to love it. Great pain is the ultimate liberator of the spirit. I doubt that such pain makes us gleeful; but I know that it makes us more profound.”

In other words, Nietzsche explains this “love of fate” or radical acceptance of life, as an acceptance of one’s life that is so complete that you would not turn back from living your life over and over and over again, an infinite number of times.

It would be a misuse of Nietzsche’s idea to imply that it means we should pretend or characterize damaging and traumatic experiences in our lives or the lives of others as desirable, or respond to the sufferings of the world with indifference and complacently. What Nietzsche was confronting was the way people are forever wishing that something different would happen in their lives - a perpetual wishing for a different fate.

This kind of radical acceptance is based on the notion that reality must be accepted, rather than denied, and that fighting and railing against a situation is a greater cause of suffering than the situation itself. Radical acceptance means accepting everything about yourself, your current situation, and your life without question, blame, or pushback. Far from a hopeless concession or apathy, radical acceptance advocates simply accepting yourself and your circumstances in order to better move through and past them.

So many of history’s spiritual and philosophical teachers re-framed the spectrum of life’s joys and sorrows in terms of acceptance. The typical mindset is to grasp for the joys and despise the sorrows. Our lives become a tandem ride of attachment to the “good” and aversion to the “bad”. But teachers and philosophers like Buddha, Jesus, Nietzsche, etc. offered a different perspective that faced all of life with acceptance, and made a place for the joys and the sorrows.

Life is filled with 10,000 joys and sorrows. Consider that each of them is an invitation to make us more profound. Rather than recoil, reset, begrudge, despise, loathe, revile our struggles, difficulties, hardships, mistakes, adversities, disappointments, and upsets, what if we insisted upon being made more profound because of them?

The goal of amor fati is not to teach you to be a cow standing in the rain, simply enduring and hoping to survive your fate. It is not to make you feel “okay” or even “good” when terrible things happen. Amor fati is more about how you interpret and respond to what comes in your life, what meaning you ascribe to the situations, circumstances and happenings of your life.

Marcus Aurelius wrote, “A blazing fire makes flame and brightness out of everything that is thrown into it.” Anthony de Mello said ,”Every painful event contains in itself a seed of growth and liberation.” Fredrick Buechner wrote, “Even the saddest things can become, once we have made peace with them, a source of wisdom and strength for the journey that still lies ahead.”

Cheryl Strayed wrote, “You can’t cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It’s just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it.”

No circumstance in life can strip you of the choice of honoring your highest truth, having a breakthrough in transformation, following the path of wisdom, or learning something valuable for your life journey. It’s often in the crucible of adversity, hardship and suffering where our character is forged and liberation emerges. Hence Nietzsche’s famous line, “What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger.”

In the life of every human being, there will be joy, peace, beauty, fulfillment and well-being. There will also be hardship, loss, adversity and suffering. Accepting the joys and despising the sorrows is living only half a life.

Instead, Nietzsche would say, learn to accept the totality of everything that happens and unfolds in your life - past, present, and future. What it means to “accept” any particular thing in your life will look different. For example, what it means to “accept” the experience of a beautiful sunset, is different from what it means to “accept” a painful loss or experience of hardship or adversity. Only you know what it means to “accept” what comes in your life. To “accept” something is to choose to see it and respond to it in a way that reflects your highest values, deepest desires, greatest hopes, and empowers your continuing journey of growth and self-actualization.

Amor fati means “love of one’s fate.” It’s to love life... your life... in its entirety.

Consider setting aside some time today and ponder this question:

On what basis can I impartially accept and appreciate everything that is in my life - everything that my life has contained in its entirety to this moment, everything that is in my life right now, everything that will ever arise in my life from this day forward?

In other words, how would you frame the totality of your life (past, present and future) that would allow you to accept and love all of it, and even live it innumerable times over for all eternity?

Consider recording an expression of this by completing the following statement:

“I will accept and love all of my life because ...”

3. I’m not up for summarizing everything I’m up to

Sometimes an end-of-year social media post is about telling people all the great things one did and achieved that year, and all the new and exciting projects and plans coming in the new year. I know as a public figure I’m supposed to do this. I’m not doing it.

I’ll keep everyone posted on my projects, endeavors and upcoming Substack articles and series when it makes sense and is useful to you in some way.

The above image is not inspiring to me. I’m not sure I want to climb more staircases for the holy grail of “success”, whatever that is. Besides, that little floating image he seems to be making eye contact with looks like a rubber duckie. Many years ago I vowed to myself never to take out a rubber duckie in the name of progress.

We have created an entire mythology about crossing into a new year (never mind that the entire construct of time and how we mark it, we made up). There’s not something magical that happens at midnight on January 1st. I get that the “New Year” is an occasion to evaluate our 2024 energy and efforts, and set a clear direction for our goals and objectives in 2025. Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” It’s a radical act to stop and contemplate your life, and to ask the hard questions. If the “New Year” prompts you to do this, great! Don’t let me stop you.

When the clock strikes midnight on January 1st, I’ll be doing the same thing I was doing on the 31st - seeking to aid people in deconstructing the beliefs, mindsets, narratives and ideologies that govern our lives, and support people in cultivating a life of liberation, self-actualization and existential health. One of the new things I’m doing for paid subscribers ($5 monthly or $50 annually) in 2025 is creating chat threads to foster more community, conversation and collaboration around these themes.

4. I’m not up for pushing New Year’s Resolutions

The top ten New Year’s Resolutions are:

1. Lose Weight and Get Fit

2. Quit Smoking

3. Learn Something New

4. Eat Healthier and Diet

5. Get Out of Debt and Save Money

6. Spend More Time with Family

7. Travel to New Places

8. Be Less Stressed

9. Volunteer

10. Drink Less

I'm not big on “New Year’s Resolutions” because they tend to dwindle and fade once the hype of changing something about one’s life wears off. Statistics say that less than 10% of new year's resolutions are achieved, which means there’s a 90+% failure rate. And even if the resolution is achieved - lose weight, exercise more, get organized, etc. - it’s often a temporary gain that doesn’t have a lasting impact in terms of a person’s consistent well-being, happiness and fulfillment. You have to dig a little deeper for that.

Even if a person accomplished a New Year’s Resolution, it may not address or resolve the root causes of a person's chronic unhappiness, disharmony, fear, anxiety, confusion, dissatisfaction, and inner suffering.

Here are 12 observations I’ve made from observing my own life and years of doing personal growth and development work with people:

Every human being has a well-constructed narrative and rationale for why they can’t be happy and have the life they desire.

A person will not change until they stop blaming others and circumstances, and take radical responsibility for their life.

The suffering from doing nothing or doing the same thing, must become greater than the resistance and fear of doing something different.

People want to change as long as they can stay in or reasonably close to their comfort zone.

Transformation is a path of doing things you think you cannot do, and would rather not.

People make self-help and personal development a hobby, as a substitute for doing the deep inner work required for true transformation.

There is no greater personal growth principle than to consistently take actions that are aligned with one’s highest truth, values, desires and intentions.

Being more “authentic” and “real” is just psychobabble if you’re not willing to get mud on your face, have people dislike, disapprove, reject or hate you, and risk your image, persona and reputation.

There’s a glut of popular self-help, motivational, enlightened personalities, gurus, teachers, books, concepts, theories and programs that people follow and bounce around to, because they falsely believe there’s “a secret”.

Most people are caught up in symptom management, and do not address the root causes of their chronic unhappiness and disharmony.

Many people are waiting on divine revelation, supernatural intervention or miraculous empowerment, rather than utilizing their natural skills and tools for transformation such as critical thinking, self-reflection, human agency and direct experience.

Most people are trying to build something new atop a foundation of shame and self-judgment/rejection, which will never work because the foundation of all wholeness and well-being is self-acceptance.

Let me ask you something. The question is NOT: What are you DOING with your life? My question is different. Here it is: Who are you BEING in your life?

Another way to ask it is: Who are you being with your life... in your life... as your life?

Many years ago in my individual work with people, I discovered the significance of working with others on the level of being. People often seek out coaching or counseling because they have a particular problem to solve, issue to address, or some specific area of their lives they want to change. But rather than focus solely on a specific problem, issue or change one feels a sense of urgency to fix, what if we explored who we are being in life.

The kind of growth and change a person can most benefit from is not putting out their latest fire or escaping their latest crisis, but doing personal work on the level of being. Transform your way of being in life, and the totality of your life and everything in it will be enriched.

Be brutally honest with yourself by introspectively considering who you are being in life. What is the driving or governing attitude, outlook, disposition, manner or mindset with which you approach life?

Is your way of being in life... fearful, resentful, defeatist, controlling, blaming, fake, combative, complacent, narrow, reluctant, arrogant, dishonest, indifferent, selfish, ungrateful, cowardly, judgmental, tentative, people-pleasing, self-diminishing, etc...?

These ways of being are corruptive and poison every aspect of your life.

What to do?

Choose a way of being that inspires you or that you feel would make the biggest difference across the entirety of your life, and seek to BE that resolutely. For example, replace being fearful with being courageous, and ask yourself what it would mean to be courage in every aspect of your life and with everything in your life.

I want to encourage you to adopt self-acceptance as a way of being with yourself. The most important freedom in life may be freedom from your own self-judgment.

I have learned there are 4 levels of self-acceptance:

• Level 1 Self-Acceptance: Universal Imperfection

This level of self-acceptance involves the realization that one's imperfections are not unique to them but universally true of every human being. You cannot judge yourself as bad, inadequate and unworthy on the basis of your imperfections unless you are prepared to assert that every human being is bad, inadequate and unworthy since every human being also has imperfections. Level 1 self-acceptance is an acknowledgement that every human being is an assortment of characteristics, mindsets and behaviors of which some are constructive toward wholeness, well-being, and flourishing, and some that are harmful to ourselves and others. This is true of every human being, including those you imagine to be better than you.

• Level 2 Self-Acceptance: Deconstruction of Causes

The root of self-judgement and shame is often false beliefs and stories we believe about ourselves, which govern our self-image. As mentioned above, shame-based religious messages, childhood trauma, and the absence of adequate love, validation and affirmation during our formative years of development, are some sources of a toxic self-image. The personal work to be done at this level of self-acceptance is to investigate and deconstruct these false beliefs and stories. This involves gaining greater understanding of the seed sources and life experiences that produced these self-condemning views of yourself. Level 2 self-acceptance is important because it enables you to shift your self-condemning judgments from “this is what I am” to “this is what I learned.” There is nothing that can be done about an item in the “this is what I am”-category. For example, your height, eye color, and core personality pattern is in this category - “this is what I am.” But your self-condemning thoughts, mindsets, beliefs and stories are in the “this is what I learned”-category, and these can be unlearned.

• Level 3 Self-Acceptance: Hospitality and Curiosity

The third level of self-acceptance is cultivating an inner disposition or space of hospitality within yourself for every thought or feeling about yourself that arises. Offering hospitality to every thought and feeling that arises is being an impartial, accepting and compassionate witness to your thoughts and feelings about yourself as they come and go. Offering hospitality is the absence of all judgment, resistance, and condemnation. This inner disposition of hospitality allows these thoughts and feelings to arise and dissolve, you neither grab ahold or resist them when they come. This space of hospitality is also one of curiosity. Rather than grab ahold of disapproving thoughts and feelings and fueling them into strongholds of self-condemnation and shame, just be curious about them. What triggered the thought or feeling? What is the false belief or story at the root of it? What is the truth that is being obscured by your emotions of self-condemnation? What can you learn from this?

• Level 4 Self-Acceptance: Answering the “What am I?” question

In my view, Level 4 Self-Acceptance is the most critical aspect of self-acceptance. Shame is internalizing a false and condemning belief about who you are. Shame says: “I AM bad”, “I AM worthless”, “I AM inadequate”, “I AM inferior”, “I AM pathetic”, “I AM a loser”, “I AM a failure”. The investigation of what you are is a critical stage of self-acceptance because what you ultimately discover is that your true and underlying nature is complete, whole, pure, radiant, undisturbed, serene, infinite, timeless, equanimous and luminous.

Shame is an attachment to an idea of what you think you are, which are all your thoughts and feelings floating around in your head. The content of these thoughts and feelings that come and go in your head are always shifting and changing, progressing and digressing, arising and dissolving, and is subject to many different factors, conditions, circumstances and variables. Even on your best day, your shifting thoughts and feelings are not a stable and reliable source or bases for your sense of identity and self. This can only be found in that whole and complete part of you that never changes. That you is a witness to every thought and feeling, and every false belief and story that arises. You think you are the false belief and story, but your true self is unaffected and untainted by them all. This is why the fundamental question in life to be answered is always: What am I?

Remember Marianne Williamson's words, “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.” Perhaps the real self-acceptance we need is not so much accepting what we feel is wrong about who we are, but accepting what is good and powerful about what we are.

The life you have and the life you want, are possibly a manifestation of who you are being.

I’m not saying that a person can work out every aspect of their lives by applying these thoughts. Personal growth and mental health are often tied to dynamics that require professional mental health services and treatment. Likewise, New Year’s Resolutions or whack-a-mole self-improvement are not adequate to address issues such as clinical depression, effects of trauma, or impact of abuse. It could be that a useful New Year’s Resolution or way of being could be reaching out for help and support.

5. I’m not up for sharing the year’s life lessons

I’m sorry. I probably should have a list of enlightening life lessons I learned in 2024 to pass along to others. Right? Social media descriptions say I’m a “critically acclaimed author” and even one of the “great spiritual writers of our time.” The other day I even noticed I’m a “religious deconstruction pioneer” and “voice of radical existential theology”. Wow! That’s a lot for a guy who uses the hunt-and-peck method of typing and had to read Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness four times and still only understand half of it… okay, a fourth.

It does my heart good whenever I discover I’ve made some small contribution to the journey of others. I’m not a guru, I’m an average writer, and any pioneering work I’ve done has been standing on the shoulders of countless people and the work they have done. I don’t have Buddha-like epiphanies to share from 2024. Unfortunately, I have to learn most things the hard way, and don’t wish my life lessons on anyone.

Perhaps just one lesson.

I’m not 25 anymore, and a lot of life has happened. I’ve walked through much hardship, heartache, loss, grief and suffering, and became stronger and more compassionate because of it. My mental toughness has developed, the softness of my heart has grown, and my humanity has deepened.

I was once warned by religion not to love the world too much. Later in life I discovered that my problem was that I didn’t love the world enough.

There’s that moment when it hits you that your life won’t last forever, and you think about the people you love deeply and thinking about it aches, and you don't know if it's because sometimes you love people so much it hurts, or because you wonder if you missed opportunities to love them or could have loved them better, and you are reminded once again that there is nothing more important than love.

The greatest single need and desire of humankind is love. To love is the greatest power and freedom we possess. Every thought, word, and action motivated by love, changes the world. Love is the highest expression of what it means to be human. The chief characteristic of true enlightenment is love.

The best I know to say is don’t leave love left undone. There may be things you don't accomplish, attain, or achieve in this world. But don’t let shrinking back from love be one of them. If you're fortunate, you discover that love is the only thing that really matters, love heals everything, and love is all there is. On your way out of this world you'll look back and see it was always about that... it was always love.

In Summary

• 2025 is here, but I refuse to write a year-end or New Year’s article, even with a There’s Something About Mary story.

• Ask yourself: Is this the life I want to be living? Is this the person I want to be? Is my life an expression of what truly and deeply matters most to me?

• New Year’s resolutions don’t pan out 90% of the time, but that shouldn’t stop you from doing your personal work to address the root causes of your chronic unhappiness and disharmony.

• The most important freedom in life may be freedom from your own self-judgment.

• When seeking success means taking out a rubber duckie, it’s time to step back and do some soul searching.

• Don’t leave love left undone.

“Begin at once to live, and count each day as a separate life.” - Seneca