Daniel's been thinking about the Jewish New Year, and he wrote in with something that's part personal inventory, part psychology question. He says he's felt disconnected from the ritual side of Judaism for years, but the framing of this season has always stayed with him. The new year begins ten days before a day of judgment, and the work is twofold. You make amends for what you've done wrong, but you also aspire toward something better. Judaism, as he reads it, accepts that humans are always a work in progress, and he wants to understand his own shortcomings through that lens.
And he's got a working list.
He's got a list. Give people the benefit of the doubt. Judge people favorably when you haven't walked in their shoes. Accept that other ways of living are just as valid as your own. And the one he says is probably above all the others, internalize that our time here is limited and nobody cares about us or what we do anywhere near as much as we think. Live whatever version of life speaks to you and forget what anybody else thinks, especially the naysayers.
That's four different psychological findings wearing a trench coat.
And then he asks the bigger question. What are the most common self-described shortcomings and self-improvement goals people articulate? Because any one of these is a monumental task, and it's probably made harder by feeling like you're the only one deficient in that particular way. He thinks there's power in zooming out and seeing that countless other humans are setting themselves similar goals. The struggle is shared even if you never meet most of the people sharing it.
So where do we even start with this?
I think we start with the calendar, because the timing matters. Rosh Hashanah this year begins at sundown on September eleventh. The Jewish year is five thousand seven hundred eighty-seven, which is a number that always sounds like a typo if you didn't grow up with it. And the Ten Days of Repentance, the Aseret Yemei Teshuvah, run from Rosh Hashanah straight through to Yom Kippur on September twentieth and twenty-first.
And the word teshuvah is where the whole reframe lives. We translate it as repentance, and that's a bad translation. The root means return. It's not about flagellating yourself. It's about returning to your best self. The assumption baked into the word is that you've been there before, or at least you know the way back.
That's a very different emotional register than guilt.
Completely. And the tradition is explicit that nobody is born perfect and nobody is expected to die perfect. The work of self-refinement, avodah, is lifelong, and that's by design rather than failure. The text Daniel's reaching for is Proverbs twenty-four sixteen, the righteous fall seven times and rise again. Not the righteous never fall. The rising is the definition.
So the tension in Daniel's prompt is interesting. His list of shortcomings is specific and personal. Give people the benefit of the doubt. Judge favorably. Accept other ways of living. Stop caring what people think. But the act of listing them is universal. Nearly everyone who sits down to do this work writes some version of those four things.
And that's the episode. The mechanism of teshuvah, what psychology tells us about the most common regrets and self-criticisms, and then the second-order question of what happens when you realize you're not alone in them.
Let's get into the mechanics. Both the Jewish framework and what psychology says about how self-improvement actually works.
The Jewish tradition breaks teshuvah into stages. The first is hakarat ha'chet, recognizing the wrong. Then charatah, regret. Then vidui, confession. Then kabbalah l'atid, resolution not to repeat it. Four steps. And if you've spent any time in a therapist's office you'll recognize the shape of it. Awareness before modification. You can't change a behavior you haven't named.
I've made this comparison before and I'll make it again. It's cognitive behavioral therapy with a theological framework. The cognitive model says identify the thought, examine the thought, replace the thought. Teshuvah says identify the action, regret the action, confess the action, resolve not to repeat the action. The sequence is nearly identical.
And the confession step is doing something specific. It's not just feeling bad privately. The vidui is spoken aloud, and on Yom Kippur it's spoken in the plural. We have sinned. We have transgressed. Not I. The entire congregation says it together, and the tradition is explicit that even if you personally haven't committed every sin on the list, you say we anyway.
That's a radical psychological move. It dissolves the shame barrier before it forms.
Shame is the thing that keeps people from doing this work at all. Shame says your deficiency is proof that something is wrong with you specifically. And the plural confession says no, this is the human condition, we're all saying it together. Which connects directly to the research on self-compassion. Kristin Neff's framework has three components. Self-kindness, mindfulness, and common humanity. That third one is the one most people skip. Common humanity is the recognition that suffering and imperfection are part of the shared human experience. It's not evidence that you're uniquely broken.
And her research shows that common humanity is the component that most directly reduces shame and isolation. The other two matter, but the isolation piece is what makes shame stick.
Right. Self-kindness without common humanity can feel like self-pity. Mindfulness without common humanity can feel like you're just watching yourself fail in high definition. The shared part is what turns it into something bearable.
Which brings us to Daniel's list, because his list is basically a survey of the most common regrets and self-criticisms humans report. The palliative nurse he mentioned, Bronnie Ware, spent years working with dying patients and wrote down the top five regrets she heard over and over. Number one was I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. Number two was I wish I hadn't worked so hard. Number three, I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings. Number four, I wish I'd stayed in touch with my friends. Number five, I wish I'd let myself be happier.
And look at what Daniel wrote. Live whatever version of life speaks to you and forget what anybody else thinks, especially the naysayers. That's regret number one almost verbatim. The dying patients weren't wishing they'd been more productive. They were wishing they'd stopped performing for an audience that wasn't actually watching.
That's the spotlight effect. People systematically overestimate how much others notice and remember about them. The classic studies had students wear embarrassing t-shirts and then estimate how many people in the room noticed. The estimates were dramatically higher than the actual numbers. Sometimes double. Sometimes more.
And the really stubborn part is that even after you explain the spotlight effect to someone, they continue to overestimate. Knowing about the bias doesn't correct the bias. It requires ongoing conscious correction. Which is exactly what Daniel's describing when he says internalize that nobody cares about us as much as we think. He's not saying it once. He's naming it as a goal for the year because he knows it won't stick on its own.
The mind defaults to the spotlight. You have to keep turning it off manually.
And here's where the dying regrets get interesting. Ware's patients weren't reporting exotic failures. They were reporting the same four or five things nearly everyone reports. The man who wished he'd lived true to himself. The woman who wished she'd expressed her feelings. The person who wished he'd let himself be happier. These are not unique pathologies. They're the standard human operating system running its standard regret patterns.
That's what Daniel's getting at with the zooming out. The list feels personal because it's yours, but the contents are off the shelf.
And the Jewish framework anticipated this. The whole structure of Yom Kippur assumes that everyone in the room is working on roughly the same material. The confession is a fixed text. You don't write your own. You say the same words as the person next to you, and the person next to you says the same words as the person across the aisle. The tradition doesn't pretend your sins are unique. It hands you a shared vocabulary.
So we know what the common struggles are. But here's where it gets interesting. What happens when we realize we're not alone in them?
The knock-on effect is that shame converts to solidarity. When you think your struggle is uniquely yours, it's a defect. When you see it as shared, it's a condition. And conditions can be worked on. Defects just sit there.
The plural confession is doing the psychological work of that conversion in real time. You walk in thinking you're the only one who judges people too harshly. You say we have sinned with the judgmental part of our hearts, and you hear five hundred other people saying the same words, and suddenly the isolation dissolves.
And the tradition is explicit that even if you haven't committed every sin on the list, you say we anyway. The rabbis understood something about shame. Collective acknowledgment is less shame-inducing and more effective than private self-flagellation. A private list of failures is just rumination. A shared list is a liturgy.
That's a distinction worth sitting with. Rumination versus liturgy. Same content, different container.
The container changes everything. Rumination is a loop. You go over the same failure again and again with no exit. Liturgy is a rhythm. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. You say the words, you beat your chest, and then you're done. The structure prevents the spiral.
And the annual rhythm matters too. The shofar on Rosh Hashanah is described in the tradition as an alarm clock. It wakes you from complacency. The image is deliberate. You've been sleepwalking through the year, and now there's a loud noise, and you're awake, and you have ten days to do the work.
The shofar is a ram's horn, and the sound is not subtle. It's a raw, unpolished blast. No melody. Just noise. The tradition says it's supposed to shake you.
Which is very different from the secular New Year resolution model. January first is arbitrary. Nothing about the calendar is asking you to reflect. You just pick a date and decide to go to the gym more. The Jewish calendar builds the reflection period into the year itself. Ten days set aside for this specific work.
And the work is not supposed to be finished. That's the misconception people have. They think the goal is to arrive at Yom Kippur having fixed everything. The tradition assumes you won't. The point is the return. Teshuvah. You come back to the work, and you'll come back to it again next year, and the year after that. The repetition is the practice.
Daniel's list is probably going to look very similar next year. And the year after. Is that failure?
No. That's the point. The same shortcomings returning year after year means you're still engaged with them. The alternative is giving up on the list entirely.
The list is the practice.
In Hebrew there's a phrase for this. Cheshbon hanefesh. Accounting of the soul. It's the practice of taking inventory. And the key word is accounting. You're not judging the soul. You're taking stock. What's here, what's missing, what needs attention. An accountant doesn't weep over the ledger. She just records what's there and makes a plan.
Daniel's list is a cheshbon hanefesh. The act of making it isn't a sign of failure. It's the practice itself.
Which resolves the tension between self-acceptance and self-improvement. Daniel wants to accept that other ways of living are valid, but he also wants to change his own patterns. Those feel contradictory. Accept yourself or improve yourself. Pick one.
The Jewish framework dissolves that by distinguishing between who you are and what you do. Who you are is inherently worthy. Created in the divine image. That's not up for negotiation. What you do is imperfect and always in need of refinement. You can accept yourself fully while still working on your behaviors.
And that's a much more stable foundation than the secular self-help version, which often assumes you're fundamentally broken and need to be fixed. The Jewish version says you're fundamentally fine and your behaviors need work. Very different starting point.
The secular version also tends to be solitary. You buy the book, you do the exercises, you improve yourself alone in your apartment. The Jewish version is communal by design. You do the work in a room full of people doing the same work.
That communal piece is what Daniel's reaching for with the zooming out. He wants to know that countless other humans are setting themselves similar goals. The Jewish framework doesn't just tell him that's true. It builds a liturgy around it.
The practical implication of the nobody's watching insight is interesting too. If you truly internalized that others aren't judging you as harshly as you think, you'd be free to make changes that feel risky. The spotlight effect doesn't just make you self-conscious. It makes you conservative.
Because you're optimizing for an audience that isn't there. You're making decisions based on what you imagine other people are thinking, and the research says you're imagining them thinking about you far more than they actually are. They're thinking about themselves. They're running their own spotlight simulation.
The correction isn't just psychological comfort. It's behavioral freedom. If nobody's watching, you can try the thing. You can live the version of life that speaks to you.
The dying patients figured this out too late. That's why it's the number one regret. They spent their lives performing for an audience that wasn't paying attention, and at the end they realized the performance was the cost.
The naysayers Daniel mentions are interesting too. He says forget what anybody else thinks, especially the naysayers. But the naysayers are a small number of people, and the research suggests even they aren't thinking about you as much as you think. The naysayer says something once and moves on. You replay it for a year.
The replay is the problem. The original comment took three seconds. The internal repetition takes hundreds of hours. And the person who said it has no idea they're living in your head rent-free.
The Jewish framework offers something specific here. The annual rhythm. The shared confession. The distinction between worth and behavior. The alarm clock that wakes you up every year whether you want it to or not.
The shofar metaphor is doing real work. The tradition doesn't wait for you to decide you're ready to reflect. It schedules the reflection. It blows a horn at you. The choice is built into the calendar.
What would it look like to build that rhythm into a secular life? Most people don't have a horn blown at them every September. They have to construct the reminder themselves.
Most people don't. The secular New Year resolution is the closest thing, and it's a pale imitation. No community, no fixed text, no ten-day runway. Just a hangover and a gym membership.
The ten days matter. The runway between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is not a countdown to doom. It's a working period. You have ten days to do the accounting. That's a very different structure than a single night of resolutions.
The resolution model assumes you'll pick the right goal and stick to it. The teshuvah model assumes you'll return to the same work you did last year and do it again. The first one is about achievement. The second one is about faithfulness.
Faithfulness to the process.
Hilbert: The word accounting is wrong.
Which word?
Hilbert: Accounting. It's too clean. The lists people make aren't ledgers. They're more like the drawer in my mother's kitchen.
Your mother kept lists?
Hilbert: Every January first she wrote resolutions on a piece of paper and put it in the drawer next to the stove. Never kept any of them. The same three things appeared almost every year. Lose weight, call her sister more, stop worrying about what the neighbors thought. She wrote them for thirty years.
Thirty years of the same three items.
Hilbert: I found them after she died. A drawer full of paper. And I thought at the time, well, that's sad. Thirty years and she never managed to lose the weight or call her sister. But I was wrong.
What changed your mind?
Hilbert: The lists were the practice. She wasn't failing to keep resolutions. She was doing the work of naming what mattered to her, once a year, for thirty years. The naming was the thing. The drawer was full of her trying.
The same three items returning every year wasn't failure.
Hilbert: It was faithfulness. She kept coming back to the same three things because those were her three things. Most people don't even know what their three things are. She knew. She wrote them down every year.
That's cheshbon hanefesh with a kitchen drawer.
Hilbert: I spent a year as a cantorial soloist at a tiny synagogue in upstate New York. Late nineties. The congregation was nearly defunct, maybe forty people, and I was the only one who could carry a tune. I had to learn the High Holiday liturgy phonetically because I'd never had a bar mitzvah. I was so focused on getting the Hebrew right that I missed the meaning of the words entirely.
The Hebrew is not forgiving.
Hilbert: It's not. And the High Holiday liturgy is long. I was surviving. Just trying not to embarrass myself in front of forty people who were mostly asleep. And then the rabbi pointed out that the confession is in the plural. We have sinned. And I looked up and the whole room was crying. And I'd been standing there thinking I was the only one barely holding on.
The plural confession doing its work.
Hilbert: The words were doing the work while I was just trying to pronounce them. The people in the room weren't crying because they were uniquely terrible. They were crying because they recognized themselves in the list. And the list was old. Those words have been said for centuries. Every person in that room was saying what every person before them said.
The crying wasn't shame. It was relief.
Hilbert: I think so. My mother wasn't Jewish. She never heard the vidui. But she did the same thing with her drawer. Same three items, year after year, written in her handwriting. The list was the practice.
Her sister. Did she ever call her more?
Hilbert: No. They talked maybe twice a year until the end. But the fact that she kept writing it down meant she never stopped wanting to. That's not nothing.
No. That's the whole thing.
Hilbert: The rabbi at that synagogue told me something I still think about. He said the confession isn't a report card. It's a mirror. You don't read it to find out how you did. You read it to see yourself.
The mirror is the same for everyone. That's the part people miss.
Hilbert: Same mirror, same words, same forty people. I don't remember the Hebrew anymore. But I remember the room.
The room is the part Daniel's reaching for. The zooming out. The shared struggle.
Hilbert: My mother's drawer was her room. She never met the people who wrote the same three things on their lists. But they were all in the drawer together.
That idea, that the list is the practice, feels like the right note to end on.
It does. But it leaves a question open. If the list is the practice, and the practice is returning to the same shortcomings year after year, then how do we measure growth? Over a year, over a decade, over a lifetime, what does improvement actually look like?
Maybe it looks like the list changing slowly. Or maybe it looks like the same list with less shame attached to it. Same three items, but the handwriting gets steadier.
The Jewish calendar gives us a built-in annual rhythm for this work. Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur, every year, whether you're ready or not. The shofar blows. The accounting begins. What would it look like to build that rhythm into a secular life?
You'd have to pick your own horn. Schedule your own ten days. Find your own room full of people saying the same words. It's harder without the tradition, but not impossible. Daniel's list is a start.
The power of zooming out isn't just that our struggles are shared. It's that our return to the work is shared too. The same list, the same drawer, the same room. Millions of people returning to the same few shortcomings, year after year, because those are the human ones.
Shanah tovah.
Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop for keeping the drawer open. This has been My Weird Prompts, the human AI collaboration podcast. If you want to think about your own list, email us at show at my weird prompts dot com.
We'll be back soon.
