Presumably you’ve abandoned your New Year resolutions by now, unless you’re truly wise, in which case you never made any to begin with. Yet even in the absence of specific plans for the coming year, it’s almost impossible, in early January, to avoid the phenomenon that researchers have unsurprisingly labelled “the fresh-start effect”: that sense of beginning a new, distinct period of life, with the foregoing year relegated to history. (This can happen in September, too, because the school year is etched so deep in our psyches.)

Studies show that these “temporal landmarks” cause us to take a big-picture view of our lives; what they don’t show is that it does us much good. Maybe there’s a brief burst of motivation, but mainly the fresh-start effect makes for unrealistic expectations and therefore disappointment. You’re so excited about making some aspect of life enormously better that real, modest changes get dismissed as insufficient.

Now that we live in a dystopian hellscape news-wise, it’s easy to see a similar risk in our expectations of the world at large. It’s tempting to assume that this must be the year the fever of mendacity, incompetence and confusion breaks. A Trump impeachment? A second referendum? Me finally understanding bitcoin? Yet if none of these happens, my expectations will only have made for an even gloomier and more disorienting 2018, even if smaller good things that are genuinely worth feeling hopeful about take place.

You might think the core of the problem here is high expectations; certainly, I’ve flirted with the idea that actively choosing low expectations might be the answer. That’s the logic behind the pleasing equation “Happiness = reality – expectations”. It implies that if your expectations are low enough – if that number in the equation is a negative number – life might be just about faultless. (As the saying goes, pessimists are always proven right or pleasantly surprised.) But low expectations aren’t actually that much better: while high expectations lead to future disappointment, low ones make you glum in the present. No wonder, then, that a common refrain in various philosophical traditions, most obviously Buddhism, is that the answer might be to have no expectations at all.

“What’s gained by setting a bar on outcomes you don’t control?” is how Jason Fried, author of several books on work, puts it. “I used to set up expectations in my head all day long. But “constantly measuring reality against an imagined reality is taxing and tiring, [and] often wrings the joy out of experiencing something for what it is.” Expectations are a superfluous overlay on life, keeping you mentally living in the future and deflated when events don’t measure up – even if those events are pretty good. I suspect it’s impossible, and perhaps not even desirable, to abandon all expectations entirely. Still, it seems a pretty good aspiration for the year ahead: not to expect less, but to expect less. Just don’t expect to be perfect at it.

oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com