TRUST ME…

Resolve not to resolve

Trust me, I’ve been there
Zoe Williams

I wonder what age you have to be before you realise that New Year’s resolutions are worthless. I suspect, in the end, it depends what the resolution is. For instance, “become friends with cool people, ditch these losers” – I think pretty early on, say by the end of primary school, you know in your heart that’s not going to happen. So you start to refine it a bit — maybe instead of a whole new family, you would settle for a tidier pencil case. Maybe you don’t need all your friends to be cool. Hell, you don’t need any friends to be cool. You dispense with the whole notion of cool. If you were born to that life, you wouldn’t get so much pleasure from the Argos advert. All this takes you to the age of about 25.

Don’t get me wrong. You still have some ludicrous January delusions. Maybe you’ll go to the sales, and think “well, I seem to be actively enjoying the thrift. What if this year were to be the year of the economy? I hereby resolve to buy almost nothing apart from tomatoes all year, and then at the end, I’ll buy a flat.”

You’ll recognise the folly of this, hopefully by June if you have any sense, or at least within five years if you haven’t. But let’s say you’re now 30, you still, still think this is a good time to go on a diet. When will you learn? You might be full of Christmas pudding now, you bozo, but that isn’t even going to last all week. You might spend the whole month wishing you could fit into a 10. By February, you will have found a shop where the 14 is called a 10, and that will be enough.

So I can say this, from the lofty wisdom of 34, you will save yourself a lot of time if you ditch all these resolutions. Unless your resolution is “make more to-do lists, fail to cross things off them”, you are bound to fail.