Perhaps we should abandon resolutions, if only to not make ourselves suffer more. One alternate pledge we might take up as we stare down 2025 might be to forgo the upright vows to spend hours on a treadmill or never eat sugar again, and attempt, instead, something like making peace with our own foibles and failures. This does not require us to stop seeing ourselves for the flawed beings that we are; merely to indulge those flawed beings every once in a while, or at the very least to keep their failures in proportion.
As I head into the new year, I have no shortage of opportunities to catalogue my own faults – and if I forget, there’s a chance some of my relatives will do so for me. But I hope to treat them as I might treat an old friend, one whom I can see clearly and still feel a certain warmth towards. There will be no moment in the coming year when any of us, I or you, are unburdened of our defects. Instead, we will keep on being what we have always been: irascible, messy, stubborn, selfish, lazy, impulsive and alive.
— Moira Donegan, from “My new year resolution? Abandon new year resolutions once and for all” (The Guardian, January 2, 2025)
