Escape. avoid. approach.
It’s that time of year again where we mark out all the ways this year is going to be different to all the ones that have come before. We swear we’re going to stop eating so badly, stop procrastinating, hell maybe even stop binge watching Netflix and pick up some Russian literature. Essentially it’s the time we curate our elaborate escape plans from the people we’ve been and who we currently are.
And maybe there are some things that we could benefit from leaving behind in 2025. Maybe we’ve been very reactive, continually over committed, drinking too much or neglecting relationships in our lives. Habits we can acknowledge are worth stopping as we enter a fresh year. But what happens to us when we continually focus on what we’re trying to avoid? It seems like a paradox. Trying to avoid something by having it as a marker of the very thing you’re wanting to avoid.
Instantly we can see how this undermines ourselves and becomes a specific type of failure. Not a failure of willpower or discipline, but a failure to understand what goals actually do. Psychology research frames behavioural change as approach goals (moving toward something) and avoidance goals (moving away from something) with approach goals consistently outperform in nearly every measurable way. This is partly because they organise behaviour around identity and capacity building rather than threat management, giving you something to move into rather than something to keep running from.
Years earlier, Simone de Beauvoir wrote about something very similar. She wasn't writing self-help, she was developing an existential ethics in The Ethics of Ambiguity. But her concept of situated transcendence maps precisely onto what makes certain goals sustainably motivating while others leave us stuck in cycles of shame and restart.
Beauvoir's concept of situated transcendence cuts through the fantasy that we're blank slates capable of infinite self-reinvention. We exist in specific circumstances. We live in our bodies, live through our histories and live out our social positions, what she calls facticity. But we're also radically free to project ourselves into the future, to transcend our current situation through action. The tension between these two realities is ambiguity. Which is uncomfortable but also permanent.
Most goal-setting advice tries to eliminate that ambiguity. It promises that if you just follow the right system, visualise hard enough, or optimise your morning routine, you'll transcend your limitations and become the person you're meant to be. Like there’s a mystical super-human currently living inside of you, just hoping you’ll crack the perfect code of 5am wakes followed by sauna and ice, matcha, walking treadmills, meditation, time-blocking, and sleep scores. Once you do, they’ll finally be unleashed to start your multi-million-dollar start-up, look like a model, and write your book on how you did it all. This is exactly the kind of bad faith Beauvoir warned against, the kind that denys either your freedom or your constraints (or both) to avoid the anxiety of living with them.
Avoidance goals such as "stop being lazy," "quit wasting time," "don't be anxious", operate by denying your current situation. They frame your present self as the problem to be escaped. You're not engaging with your facticity, you're only trying to delete it.
Approach goals work differently. "Develop a skill I've been curious about." "Build capacity to focus for longer periods." "Cultivate practices that ground me when I'm overwhelmed." These acknowledge where you are now and project forward from that position. They engage with your situation rather than fleeing it.
A Beauvoirian approach to goals acknowledges both. Yes, set ambitious targets. But recognise that you're doing so as someone with a particular body, history, and set of circumstances. The goal isn’t to escape your situation but to engage with it meaningfully, to live through it rather than fantasise your way out of it, and to create forward movement that expands what’s possible rather than denying what currently is.