"New Year's resolutions work like this: you think of something you enjoy doing, and then resolve to stop doing it. Smoking, for instance, or drinking, or shunting fistfuls of salted butter down your ravenous maw each morning. By denying yourself some of your few remaining pleasures, you hope to extend your lifespan, so you can spend extra decades forlornly wishing you were smoking or drinking or gorging on butter instead of slowly withering to death in a self-imposed prison of abstinence.
Stop being lazy, you tell yourself. And as you lace up your running shoes with the enthusiasm of a man condemned to eat damp cardboard for ever, you know you will fail, and you will dislike yourself for failing. Rather than setting yourself a New Year's resolution, why not simply pick a reason for hating yourself for the next 365 days? Takes less time, and it's easier to stick to.
Or you could do what I'm doing this year: setting New Year's resolutions for everyone in the world except me. These are the things I want humankind to stop doing immediately, on the grounds they've been doing them too long. They won't listen, but that's OK, because as I've already established, resolutions are doomed to fail. Oh, and I've chosen the really huge bugbears, obviously, not the little ones like global economic justice or racial intolerance. We won't change those till the Martians land and command us to sort that shit out.
Anyway, the list:"
Charlie Brooker /The Guardian/continue reading
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