2025: new year's resolutions
Before stepping into 2025, my partner and I had a gentle conversation about new year's resolutions. I like contemplating them because they help me outline a beautiful future ahead. As critical realists, we don't believe that we can predict the future, but it's ok to dream about it and take gentle, and sometimes big, steps, to achieve what we hope to achieve.
In my previous entry, I mentioned that 2025 will be another low buy year. But this is not one of our resolutions. It's just the way I've lived for the past 15 years or so, as I de-prioritised buying as an activity in my life as much as possible (while prioritising other things such as growth, creativity, love towards the self, human and non-human others, and nature). I simply plan to continue this journey. After re-reading my previous entry, I realised that it might come across as abstract. Going forward, I will try to be more concrete in this autoethnography what living with less and buying less actually looks like, for me, in reality.
There are some new year's resolutions that my partner and I made together. These are:
To eat out less. We eat out very rarely, but we want to do it even less. We enjoy cooking and eating at home so much more.
To share our knowledge with a broader audience. To us, as both academics and practitioners, it is so important to share knowledge about both our theory (of sustainability transformations) and practice with fellow humans. We do it via our academic books, articles and lectures. Most of the time, these reach fellow academics and students. Doing my autoethnography and making all of it public made me realise that in academia we don't do enough to reach more fellow humans.
To dream about the future. Eventually, we would love to leave Copenhagen and live closer to nature. We would love for our yet unborn child to grow up with nature. And we would love to grow some of our own food. In nature, I feel more creative. I feel oneness and self-transcendence often. Moving elsewhere is not one of our new year's resolutions, but it's a dream that can be fulfilled if we work on it.
There are also new year's resolutions that I made for myself:
To be in academia on my terms. After getting my PhD in 2020, I thought that I had to do what others did. To find a postdoc position and then try to get a permanent position. Such positions are generally not only scarce, but seem to be often offered to those fellow humans who have some history at the department. For example, those could be former PhD students and postdocs who stayed somewhere long enough. I left my postdoc position as an act of protest against harassment in academia and moved to another country. During this year as a researcher, I had much time to work on my own projects and contemplate how I wanted to relate with academia, what I was willing to accept and what I wasn't. For example, strategic networking is certainly not me. It does not feel authentic. Trying to hide my pregnancy and invent different strategies to erase it from my cv is not me either. The truth is, in the first trimester I felt incredibly unwell. I was hospitalised, constantly on medication, and sleeping a lot. I've never worked so few hours since I started school. And that's ok. If I publish less in the year I give birth, so be it.
To invest more time in my autoethnography. This autoethnography originally existed as personal notes, starting from around 2010 when I stepped on a path of relating with the world differently and practising minimalism. A few years ago, I decided to turn it into a small academic project. From the very beginning, I made all my data public for research transparency reasons. Fellow humans started to read my notes/data as a blog. This allowed me to connect with many fellow practitioners from different walks of life. I feel deep gratitude for it. And even though this is not the work that brought academic positions my way (my research for many years has focused on sustainability in business and sustainability transformations), it is the most fulfilling and spiritually rewarding part of what I create and offer to the world. I plan to dedicate more time and energy to it in 2025.