An Anti–New Year’s Resolution for Autistic Brains

In January, we will explore the annoying habits of highly effective people, cargo-cult productivity, and a more affirming way for Autistic and ADHD people to set goals without self-betrayal

Each January, the media invites us to treat New Year’s resolutions as a test of discipline, mindset, or personal virtue. “Lose weight!” “Write a book!” “Start a business!” “Learn a language!” This framing assumes that success follows correct intention, belief, and discipline; while failure to reach these goals signals a flaw in effort, thinking, or character. Research backs this up, too. When scientists model success over time, they find that talent matters, but luck matters more, and the most successful people are rarely the most talented; they are the ones who happened to encounter more good breaks and fewer bad ones, and then had those breaks compound.

In the Late Diagnosis Club, though, we are going to work on a different approach: an Anti-capitalist, Anti-New Year’s Resolution which I’m calling Attention Anchors.

For a long time, I credited my own success to productivity, discipline, and systems that appeared to work. I treated output as proof that I had figured something out. When I hit burnout, that story fell apart, because the same effort and skill suddenly produced very different results. Looking back, I can see how much of my success depended on timing, access, health, and a run of luck that I did not earn and could not recreate on command.

For Autistic and ADHD people, resolutions built around constant self-correction and optimization often increase self-hate and even contribute to burnout rather than leading to meaningful change. More useful goal setting for everyone, but especially for us, starts from reality, allows for uncertainty, and treats missed goals as information about needs and context, not evidence of personal failure.

This is where many late-diagnosed Autistic adults carry unnecessary shame. You know you can be productive because you have been productive in the past. You remember periods of intense focus, sustained output, and visible achievement. Why can’t you just do it again?!?! And so we begin to mimic some of the behaviors that seem to lead to success. The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People is a great example of this. Let’s say successful people tend to wake up early and have a morning routine, right? We then ATTRIBUTE that early wake up time and morning routine to the success as if waking up caused the success instead of being a by-product of it. And so we perform waking up early and working out every morning as a new year’s resolution thinking that is what is going to lead to success, but instead it leads to self-hate and contributes to burn-out. When that level of performance becomes unsustainable, it is easy to blame ourselves for not meeting our goals.

This is where the idea of cargo-cult productivity becomes useful. Cargo cults were religious movements that arose in parts of the Pacific (like the island of Vanuatu) after contact with colonial and military powers, particularly during World War II. Local communities observed that foreign soldiers arrived with uniforms, weapons, drills, and displays of authority, and that these appearances coincided with the sudden arrival of vast amounts of material goods. In an effort to reproduce those outcomes, some communities began to copy these visible behaviors with fake wooden guns, salvaged military uniforms from the colonizers, and actually building mock runaways and control towers, all in an attempt to get cargo to fall by parachute or land in planes or ships again! Needless to say it didn’t work, but there are charismatic leaders today making a living teaching and enforcing this charade performing ceremonial dances for Prince Phillip to return from the afterlife and fulfill their wishes for supplies delivered by boat. And you know what? I actually don’t think it’s that far off on what we do with New Year’s Resolutions.

Much of what we are taught about effectiveness with our resolutions is built on copying the visible habits of people who succeeded under very specific circumstances. I’m telling you this is some SERIOUS Cargo Cult Bull Shiitake! Early mornings, rigid routines, relentless focus, vision boards: these rituals promise control in a world that is deeply uneven. When they don’t work, the failure gets internalized. Which is all part of the plan!

Let me remind you that your past productivity is not evidence of limitless capacity, it’s more likely evidence of your monotropism. Hyperfocus works in a very different way to the productivity gospel. Give an Autistic person the right project, the right support, the right health, the right timing, the right environment, and sometimes, yes, the right amount of masking - and we can get a lot done. But remove any one of those, and the system collapses. That is not laziness. That is the physics of our hyperconnected brains.

One of the most damaging expectations we have to live with as Autistic people is the expectation people have that if we once did something, we should always be able to do it again on demand. And we put that expectation on ourselves too, but that belief ignores burnout, nervous system limits, the destructive power of masking, changing responsibilities, and the simple fact that luck does not repeat itself on schedule. It turns adaptability into a moral test and rest into a personal failure.

We ignore the cost to our nervous systems, but make no mistake, burnout is the delayed consequence of prolonged overextension in environments that required constant regulation, masking, or sensory suppression. Past success may have been chemically, neurologically, or metabolically unsustainable, not merely dependent on favorable circumstances.

Productivity culture, by design, turns structural randomness into personal obligation. When success is treated as proof of virtue, chance disappears from the explanation, and responsibility shifts entirely onto the individual. This is where shame takes root and it’s why imposter syndrome is such an issue for late diagnosed or identifying Autistic people. We are being asked to reenact a system that only worked under exceptional conditions and to blame ourselves when that system fails us. When those conditions change, effort alone cannot compensate. Remembering past productivity without remembering the conditions that supported it creates a false baseline that no nervous system can meet indefinitely.

That’s why this month in the Late Diagnosis Club, we are not chasing better habits or stronger willpower. We are questioning the stories that taught us to measure our worth by output in the first place. Anti–New Year’s resolutions are not about doing less for the sake of it. They are about telling the truth about how work, success, and capacity actually function, and building lives that do not require constant self-betrayal to keep going.

In January we will spotlight 5 members of the Late Diagnosis Club and we will meet live on Zoom (cameras always optional) 3 times to explore themes of healthy productivity with therapeutic writing, a book club selection, and a burnout recovery workshop.

You can join us if you aren’t already a member and you have until our first meeting of the year on January 14th to get 50% off membership fees.

If you are already a member, keep reading for the member’s only schedule for the month.