Mr. Irresponsible doesn’t believe in New Year’s resolutions.
A New Year’s resolution is a dream of self-betterment, fed by the sugary
bedtime snack of a wrongheaded belief in human perfectability. (Mr.
Irresponsible also doesn’t believe in human perfectability. Gosh, there are so many things Mr. Irresponsible doesn’t
believe in!) And yet, people continue year after year to scrawl their New
Year’s wish lists, as if they were in the grip of some mass delusion. Which, of
course, they are. It is the delusion that this year, of all years, we will live
by the lights of what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. This
year of all years we will eat less, read more, be kind to others. This year,
this year.
The problem is,
the well-meaning but scrawny better angels of our nature were long ago whomped
into submission by the true angels of
our nature -- huge, snappish, ill-tempered creatures who look something like the guy on “American
Chopper.” Would you want to go up against the guy on “American Chopper”?
Not me, and neither would the better angels of our nature. They checked out
years ago. So what’s really fueling the annual ritual of the New Year’s resolution?
Some atavistic impulse toward self-improvement, which in any sane world would
have been filed away eons ago with other atavistic impulses, like the one that
drove our monkey forebears to pick small insects out of our relatives’ coats
and eat them.
I don’t really imagine that one advice columnist can break
an entire nation of its addiction to a ritual this powerful. The best I can do
is offer some tips for formulating your own New Year’s resolutions if you
absolutely insist on making them, which, let’s face it, you do. My hope is that
these tips will at least help you make more effective use of your
resolution-making time by shattering unrealistic goals and lowering
expectations. That’s my New Year’s gift to you -- the precious gift of lowered
expectations. Take it and be reasonably well and sort of happy in 2006.
MR. IRRESPONSIBLE’S GUIDE TO NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS, IF YOU
ABSOLUTELY INSIST ON MAKING THEM
1. Make them vaguely
useful. The world does not need more French speakers. The world needs more
neurosurgeons.
2. Keep them short. A
New Year’s resolution which is so verbose it needs to be written down and
carried around in your wallet has absolutely no chance of being kept. Here’s a
handy rule of thumb: If your resolution is so long it needs to be
spell-checked, it’s useless.
3. Don’t aim those
things at me. Any resolution whose goal is altering the behavior of another
person is doomed to failure. There is a simple reason for this: All attempts to
alter the behavior of other people, whether formulated in early January or
mid-summer, are doomed to failure. I’ll change when I’m good and ready, thank
you. Go change yourself if you love changing things so much. You can start with
that striped sweater. You know the one.
4. Keep them to
yourself. If there’s ever been anything more deadly than a roomful of
people boring each other stiff with their New Year’s resolutions, it would have
to have been the Influenza Epidemic of 1918.
5. Have fun
with them. Be creative. As long as you’re
setting yourself an impossible task, why not embrace the very impossibility of
it? Forget about resolving to quit smoking. A chimp can quit smoking. Instead,
resolve to master time travel. That’ll give ‘em something to talk about at your
next SmokEnders meeting. (Ed. Note: This
is apparently the way the program actually
spells its name. My resolution is to procure them the extra “e” they
apparently were too jittery to include.)
Good luck, and semi-happy New Year. (Remember: lowered expectations.) And remember too that if the burden of self-improvement proves too crushing -- and it will -- there is always someone who loves you just as you are.
Oh heavens, I just read that and saw what it looked like. It's not me. I just figure there has to be someone who loves you just as you are. I mean, it's The Law of Large Numbers, right? Then again, I was always pretty bad at math.
Friday, December 30, 2005 at 4:30AM in
Reader Comments (1)
Wonderful post... Very informational and educational as usual!
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