Have you ever noticed how class attendance at your gym surges in January? For roughly three weeks, people from your neighborhood drag themselves in droves, hogging the treadmills and the coveted 8-lb weights. And then, come January 21, like a hidden human stopwatch, there’s a mass exodus back to “real life.” The weight didn’t come off fast enough, life interrupted and the gym was too crowded. Who’s to say these individuals didn’t switch to another gym or start working out at 3 a.m., but most likely, many of them are back to watching re-runs and eating mac n’ cheese instead of pumping iron. It’s difficult to change.

Last year, I vowed to change my life in a number of ways, many of which were a little murky on the one hand (“remember who you are”, “invent the life you want”), or too specific on the other hand (“go to one UX class or workshop a month”). There was one I achieved, like “read more fiction” and a few I didn’t (“blog more”, “lend my skills to causes”). And so if I were to look back and survey the success of last year based on my so-called resolutions, on a very basic level, I failed. But I set myself up for failure. None of these resolutions were goals that would fundamentally shape me as a better human being; instead, these were peripheral to-dos, serving as obligations at the edge of someone I maybe wanted to be. I don’t know yet, because I’m still figuring that out.

Have we as a culture ever stopped to reflect on the pressure we create for ourselves with resolutions? Many of us make daily, weekly and monthly goals year-round. We create to-do lists, complete tasks, run marathons, ship products, write novels, improve our health and make new friends. Yet, just as the calendar year ends and those two arbitrary numbers, 31, approach on our many calendars, we’re already thinking about what we must to do feel successful by the end of a year that hasn’t even emerged from time’s illusory grasp.

As time unfolds, so does life, in parallel. If we’re anchored and set in habits we create for ourselves, we’re not adapting in real-time to the opportunities that surface as life shifts and mutates. We start out a new chapter in our lives by writing the last sentence, and miss the joy of the thickening plot.

I’m convinced resolutions are about ideals: we each individually want to be the “type of person who does X.” In fact, “learn something exciting” and “fall in love” are both top 10 resolutions, with only 8% of resolution-makers succeeding. How can we make ourselves fall in love? What does “exciting” mean, exactly? It’s no wonder we have trouble achieving these goals. These are life developments not meant for us to “achieve”, they’re meant to happen, to occur when we’re busy living life. What this says is really that these people want to be interesting and they want to be loved.

This resolution-frenzy, however, is not all our own fault. The internet’s many cues tell us we should be a bajillion things at once, and possess the qualities of CEOs, gods, models, geniuses and romanticized introverts. We should be outdoorsy and adventurous but rakish and groomed. We should be knowledgeable of food, but svelte and fit. We should read magazines as well as dozens of books. We should be up-to-date on politics, well-traveled, have active dating lives, wake up early, blog often, get enough sleep, have changing wardrobes, understand art references, volunteer, make new friends, be social creatures, be sedulous consumers of pop culture, take lots of pictures, be witty on twitter and poetic on instagram, worry less and make more money, be entrepreneurial and unoffensive, get a promotion and be generally fascinating to anyone who ever encounters us.

Not only are many of these ideals contradictory to one another, but defining who we are goes against our very nature; living up to ideals creates frustration, disappointment and often ends in defeat. At least, it did for me in 2013.

I don’t know about you, but if I’m focused on following my own orders, then the universe might as well skip over me with new opportunities to develop as a human being. I can’t let the internet or others’ perception dictate who I become, or I will become an amalgamation of emptiness. A person full of nothing. A shell.

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One of the most freeing moments I had in 2013 was realizing, rather suddenly while lying in shavasana, that I didn’t have to be “the type of person who does X.” So much of the pressure weighing me down has come from feeling like I have to live up to the abstruse definition of being a modern woman. I should know the history of everything, be both creative and business-minded, empathetic and authoritative, demure and confident, downtown cool and feminine, fashionable and financially independent, thin and happy. I should I should I should. Well, I took the “shoulds” and dropped them like a hot potato. Chuck the deuces. Peace out. No más.

This year, I’m making no promises. I’m living up to no ideals. I will let life guide me and pay attention to details. I will reflect often how I feel, and use that energy to create, hide, build, accept and develop whatever is thrown at me. And when I start to compare and contrast my life to others and to the concocted lives I see on the internet, I breathe. In and out. Be me. Repeat.