Guilt gets a bad rap. I’m guilty, but my new year’s resolution is to be OK with it

I’m not a fan of resolutions. They don’t last. But more on that later – it turns out some resolutions are more likely to work than others.

The endless lack of working doesn’t seem to discourage people from making them at the beginning of a new year. It’s what researchers call “the fresh-start effect”. We somehow have this magical thinking which tells us that as December ticks over into January, we might be more likely to do the thing we’ve always put off.

Illustration: Simon LetchCredit:

It’s also the time of year when we have lots of big feelings anyhow – stressed financially, spending more time with relatives than we are used to, and being on a break from usual routines for which we learn to manage ourselves and our emotions. At this time of year, we should be, as they say in Wicked-land, holding space for ourselves. But that’s not how it turns out.

As for the fresh-start effect, I don’t subscribe to that – my biggest motivations are never linked to the time of year. Instead, the shifts are almost always connected to conversations – with family, with friends, with my personal changemakers, with my lovely GPs who’ve been threatening kindly over the years. These are the people who cajole me to do stuff.

But over time, I’ve built myself lists of things I should do (column A) and have updated them. Mostly, I’m hopeless at abiding by them. Please – please – tell me you, too, have failed.

I’ve also given myself little lists of what I shouldn’t do (column B). A little bit of this and a little bit of that. But a conversation this month made me move one of the things I’d tried to discourage in myself from column A to column B. So, let me get the serious one out of the way first.

Yep, guilt. Tried really hard to rid myself of it.

Not much can make you feel as guilty as the “bad mother” syndrome, which I’d argue hit my generation hard. We were the first generation of women to work full-time and the evidence was not yet in on how that would affect our kids. Since then, there’s been plenty to say that good childcare is good for children and that working mothers are good role models for their offspring. But those feelings of guilt were hard to shake – and there’s a whole vibe from some therapists that guilt is bad.

In my conversation with Ian Hickie, director of the Brain and Mind Centre at the University of Sydney, he had another take altogether.

“Guilt is about taking responsibility for the stuff you did actually do,” Hickie said. “The danger is getting lost in inaction and regret and in going backwards. But really, it is a strong motivation for getting things right and taking responsibility.”

He described this era of pushing back against guilt as Trumpian. “Guiltless people are pretty hard to live with. It’s always someone else’s fault. Personal responsibility has gone out the window.”

And I said: But guilt feels bad. And he said: “That’s the interesting thing about it. It feels awful but it is a strong motivator to put things right.”

Putting things right. So what else should we do this coming year to put things right?

Oops, another serious one. Take a long, hard look at who we plan to vote for. Try not to get swept up in the campaigning (which gets worse – and uglier – every single time).

Remember how Australians got sucked into the way the Coalition framed tax changes as a war on wealth in 2019? Now it turns out that if we hadn’t been swayed by extremely rich guy Geoff Wilson and his doting cousin Tim, then a federal Liberal MP, in their spirited defence of franking credits, we may have had a fairer tax system.

Next, read the Grattan Institute’s submission to the Senate Standing Committees on Community Affairs on how to fix the rental crisis: reduce the capital gains tax discount from 50 per cent to 25 per cent, limit negative gearing and include owner-occupied housing in the age pension assets test. Plus! OMG, and of course, as the Grattan submission said, “housing would also be better allocated if the federal government supported states to replace stamp duty with a broad-based land tax”.

We know from this masthead that Jim Chalmers has conducted secret treasurer’s business regarding negative gearing, so let’s hope we’ve all moved on from being selfish bastards in 2019 and recognise that our tax system needs to change. If we have to have a resolution, let’s think about voting for the good of all of us, not just some of us.

Last year, I finally moved two things off my “definitely should do” list to the “done” column. I installed solar panels. My god, game-changing! Bill-changing! Even when we morphed from an empty-nester couple living in a five-bedroom house into six of us living in the same place, with the washing machine and dishwasher going all day, my bills were squelched into tininess. Then I moved all my subscriptions to digital! Now I need to buy an iPad where newspapers look as they should look.

Still struggling with my “definitely shouldn’t do” list. I am a shocking nagger of all and sundry and absolutely know I shouldn’t be doing that. Yet I persist.

So what makes a resolution work? Apparently, we are more likely to stick to things when our aim is approach-oriented, meaning they are instigated or directed by a desirable outcome. Losing weight, giving up smoking, taking up exercise. Then, there are avoidance-oriented resolutions: wanting to avoid a negative outcome.

If you plan to make a resolution for 2025, I recommend accentuating the positive. I reckon you could frame any goal either way. Want to lose weight? That’s about living longer instead of dropping dead.

And now, after all these years, I get to reframe guilt. That’s a win.

Jenna Price is a regular columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.