The Best New Year’s Resolution I Ever Made

New Year’s Eve. It never lives up to the hype. Even as a drinker, I rarely enjoyed it. It came laden with an inflated sense of expectation; it would be mental, amazing, the best night ever. But what it turned out to be, invariably, was just another night. Followed by another terrible hangover.

Many of my most depraved drunken exploits happened under the auspices of New Year’s, more often than not in some sticky-floored nightclub. Oh how I hate nightclubs with a sincere passion; it’s a permanent stain on my history that I spent so much time in them. At least now that I’m middle-aged, I can freely express my loathing for them without giving the slightest toss about appearing uncool.

Anyway, one New Year’s Eve I was inside such an establishment, enjoying the warm embrace of an Ecstasy pill and consequently dancing like I was South London’s answer to Usher (if that seems like a dated reference, I refer you to my prior comment about being middle-aged and not giving a toss). Unfortunately, mixing this ‘Mitsubishi pill’ (so named for the logo stamped on them) with copious amounts of Red Bull led to me collapsing, and promptly being carted out like Trevor Berbick after his Tyson bout. To add insult to injury, I was really hitting it off with a young lady who, for reasons I can’t fathom, lost interest in me once I was spreadeagled on the floor. All in all, pretty pointless.

And if New Year’s Eve felt pointless, New Year’s resolutions were even worse. A bunch of promises and ill-defined objectives that I’d honour for a few weeks, before slipping back into the same destructive habits that kept my life stagnant. The prospect of a New Year can feel like a fresh start, a chance to begin again and do everything right this time. Subsequently, the resolutions you make are often loaded with so much hope and expectation (much like New Year’s Eve) that when you inevitably fall short, a kind of nihilism can set in: What’s the point? It’s all futile. New Year, new me? What a load of crap.

So why am I dampening your festive cheer with these morose observations? Because I want to tell you about one resolution that I believe can genuinely transform your life, as it did mine. And that resolution is: be brutally honest with yourself.

To varying extents, we all lie to ourselves and make excuses for our bad habits, or for when we’re lazy and lacking in motivation. Say you want to change careers, but the risk of doing so and the hard graft needed to make it happen are too daunting. It’s far easier to convince yourself that it’s impossible, that it would be a waste of time, that the ‘sensible’ option is to make the best of what you have. This may give you comfort in the moment, but it starts a vicious cycle that makes you miserable in the long term. You know, deep down, that it’s not impossible. But you don’t want to admit the truth: that you’re afraid. So you take measures to accommodate the lie you’ve told yourself, and your life becomes deeply inauthentic as a result. You end up removing your own agency, and not taking responsibility for your actions.

If you simply admit that you’re afraid, then you can do something about it. The ball is in your court. You can make a plan, ask for help, use your God-given brain to work it out. But if you make excuses, if you blame external factors for your inability to act, you take all the power away from yourself. And that’s how you end up bitter, resentful, envious, standing on the sidelines of your own life. The truth can be painful, but pain is an essential part of growth. And growth simply doesn’t happen if you never leave your comfort zone.

So if you’re sitting there, trying to think up your 2025 goals and feeling at a loss, start by doing one thing: tell the truth. Arm yourself with the truth. Give yourself the power, the responsibility, the agency. Expect it to be painful, because it will be. It will also be one of the most worthwhile things you’ll ever do.

Happy New Year.

Francis