Goals are actually just cope
Why setting goals feels productive, but rarely changes anything
Happy New Year, friends! One thing most of you probably know about me by now is that I tend to look at life through a systems lens. I write about systems because I’ve watched how often people blame themselves for things that are really structural problems. We tell ourselves we need more discipline or motivation, when what we usually need is a better setup. The new year makes that disconnect especially obvious. We set goals about who we want to become without changing the machinery of our lives that determines who we actually are. I want 2026 to be a genuinely good, abundant year for the people reading this, which is why I wanted to share this piece today. I don’t think most people fail at their goals due to laziness or lack of willpower, I think we fail because we’re taught to focus on outcomes instead of the systems that produce them. That’s why I keep coming back to systems over goals. If 2026 is going to be different in any meaningful way, it won’t be because of a list, it’ll be because of the structures we build underneath our lives. “New year, new me” requires new systems.
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It’s January 1st, which means the same ritual is unfolding everywhere. Fresh notebooks are being unwrapped, calendars are being color-coded, long podcasts about optimization and protocols are playing in the background while people decide that this year will finally be different. The holidays are over, the distraction has worn off, and you’re left looking directly at the last twelve months, and trying to imagine a different year ahead. Goal-setting has become the socially acceptable way to manage the discomfort.
We write lists of everything we want to fix—our bodies, our finances, our habits—and we call them resolutions. Writing them down feels like movement, like a form of taking responsibility. It feels like you’ve already begun! But most of the time, what you’ve really done is administer a mild sedative to the anxiety of being behind.
If lists actually changed lives, February would look very different. The gyms wouldn’t empty out and the journals wouldn’t disappear into drawers. But they do, every year, because writing down an intention and changing your life are two entirely different activities. One soothes guilt, while the other requires restructuring how your days actually work.
The problem isn’t that people don’t want to change. Most people genuinely do. The problem is that a goal is a static snapshot, while a life is a dynamic system. When you set a goal, you’re trying to pin a specific outcome onto a future version of yourself without changing the conditions that shape your behavior in the present.
Psychologist Kurt Lewin described behavior as a function of the person and their environment. That framing matters because goals tend to ignore the environment entirely. For example, saying you want to lose twenty pounds or write a book assumes that the person you’ll be six months from now will have different energy, discipline, and priorities than the person you are today, even though nothing structural has changed. A goal assumes continuity of motivation, but real life rarely provides it.
That’s why systems work better. A system doesn’t require you to predict who you’ll be in the future. It already assumes you’ll be tired some days, distracted on others, and occasionally unmotivated. Instead of demanding a specific result, it shapes the conditions that make certain behaviors easier and others harder. Over time, the output follows.
I learned this the hard way. For years, all throughout my twenties, I’d set aggressive goals with no real way to get there. No way to measure or track them, and no methods to hold myself accountable. On paper, the goals were ambitious and clear, but in practice, I was relying on willpower to bridge gaps that should have been handled by structure. The years things actually changed and scaled were the years I stopped obsessing over the numbers on my lists and focused on how my days actually worked. I paid attention to my bandwidth, constraints, and workflow. I built a machine that could run even when my motivation dipped. Once the machine worked, the outcomes stopped needing micromanagement and became second nature. It became easier for me to do the thing than to not do the thing. (That should be the goal, by the way!)
Let this be the year you finally stop bullshitting yourself.
If you look at people who actually changed the world, very few of them operated like modern goal-setters. Thomas Edison didn’t have a quarterly KPI for the lightbulb, he had a lab and a process of relentless testing. Marie Curie didn’t resolve to win Nobel Prizes, she committed herself to a daily practice of scientific work that she repeated until it physically exhausted her. Leonardo da Vinci left countless works unfinished because he wasn’t trying to complete a checklist, he was following a personal system of curiosity and study.
Heraclitus understood this long before productivity culture existed. He wrote that everything flows. reality moves, circumstances shift. Rigid goals demand a fixed outcome on a fixed timeline, which makes them fragile. When life interrupts—and it always does—the goal collapses and you interpret that collapse as a personal failure. But systems bend. They absorb disruption. They keep going.
So why do goals remain so popular? Because they feel good immediately. No seriously, neuroscience says so. The brain releases dopamine when you set a goal, not just when you achieve one. Declaring an intention produces a reward in the present moment. Announcing a new plan, whether in a journal or on social media, creates the sensation of progress without requiring sustained effort.
Everyone has seen this play out. Someone posts a long caption about a new era or a major pivot, receives a flood of validation, and then quietly returns to their old patterns. The reward arrived early so the nervous system already feels soothed. There’s no urgency left to actually follow through.
This is why goal-setting often functions as anxiety management. It helps you tolerate the gap between who you are and who you think you should be. It allows you to feel proactive without enduring the discomfort of real change. In that sense, goals are less about the future and more about regulating the present.
Underneath all of this is something even harder to admit, though. Many goals are driven by fear rather than ambition. They come from shame about where you are, or anxiety about falling behind, or a quiet worry about becoming irrelevant. The goal becomes a promise that if you achieve enough, you’ll finally feel safe.
Joan Didion wrote about how we impose narrative lines on disparate moments to make sense of our lives. Goals often serve that function. They organize chaos into a story with a beginning, a middle, and a triumphant ending. That story can be comforting, but comfort isn’t transformation.
Real change rarely announces itself, and it definitely doesn’t begin on a symbolic date. It shows up on an ordinary Tuesday when you choose the harder option because that’s how your life is structured now, not because you wrote it down weeks earlier. If something requires a calendar date to begin, it probably wasn’t anchored in anything solid to begin with.
January is arbitrary in the scheme of life systems, but it does offer an opportunity for clarity. You can keep writing lists that help you feel better about where you are, or you can start adjusting the systems that quietly determine how your days unfold. One of those paths feels productive immediately. The other one actually changes your life.
Reminder: you have the power to choose to change your life.
Below the paywall are some practical applications to help you get started on a path to real change:
Five ways to replace a goal with a system.
A quick test for whether or goal is real or emotional theater.
Common goals that are actually just anxiety management.
What to do on January 1st instead of setting goals.
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