“If there were a museum of terrible self-help ideas, the new years resolution would have its own wing. I mean, in a nut, if new years resolutions worked, you wouldn’t need them. The problem with new years resolutions, setting aside the drunk-in-a-paper-hat part, is that people get frustrated because they have all this enthusiasm to say, ‘Oh, the calendar’s changing so I should be different!’ And we commit, or half-commit, to some kind of outlandish change to ourselves. And most of us, in my experience, end up failing miserably and feeling worse than when we started. Which if you do that for enough years becomes a kind of rehearsal where the real habit you’re building is sucking. You’re building the habit of unrealistic expectations you can never live up to, and then being really great at sucking at them faster and faster every year until you’ve got a big scrotum of anger.”

5 months ago   |  34 notes