How’s that new year’s resolution working out? Yeah, I thought so, there’s a guilty look about you.
But I am not here to apportion blame. Not today, anyway. Because resolutions are a bad idea.
It’s all very well to sit nursing an eggnog hangover on New Year’s Day and decide you’re going to quit smoking, lose weight or stop stealing electricity from your neighbours. It’s something else entirely to find yourself several days later cigaretteless, hungry and faced with the grim reality of having to pay for your own hot water.
Why do we do this to ourselves? Why do we start the year by setting ourselves up for almost certain failure? Things are miserable enough in the middle of January without any extra help. You’re probably broke, you’re almost certainly bloated and there’s a very good chance that you’re also bloody cold. Remember a few weeks ago when we had all that freezing rain and everything was covered in a thin layer of ice? I’m starting to miss that.
Resolutions are hard, which I suppose is the entire point. Resolving to spend the next several months lying on the couch watching Netflix and eating Cheetos doesn’t really cut it. There has to be a degree of difficulty and an element of challenge or you might as well not bother.*
And that’s why, according to figures I just made up, somewhere around 95 percent of resolutions will have been abandoned by the end of January; forgotten and consigned to the trash can of history along with the turkey carcass, a pile of empty gin bottles and Ghislaine Maxwell’s chances of ever landing a job as a camp counsellor.
You can’t deny that there’s something admirable about wanting to start the new year as a better person, whether that means reading more, giving up a bad habit, getting some exercise or stopping recycling the same half dozen jokes over and over (sorry folks, it won’t happen again**). But don’t we have enough misery on our plate right now without a failed resolution to remind ourselves of our own failures, shortcomings and general lack of moral fibre? Spoiler alert: yes we do. And besides, isn’t pointing out your numerous character flaws your wife’s job?
So if you’ve already fallen off the wagon, if you just spent 20 minutes going through the back of the fridge in the hope of finding one more slice of illicit pumpkin pie or if you found that first trip to the gym since 1998 just a little bit more than you bargained for, I want you to forgive yourself. Becoming a better person is hard work and, you know, there’s a pretty good chance that most of your friends like you just the way you are. After all, they’ve put up with you for this long, haven’t they?
*Incidentally, I used to have a friend who liked to say that quitting smoking was easy, because he’d personally done it four times. Then he’d laugh like a drain. I think he’s an MLA now.
** Yeah it will.
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