It’s official: making resolutions is useless. Or rather: it serves a purpose, and that is to give you endless guilt in a very short time. You don’t need much of it: as early as mid-January or early February at the latest, you’ll have to admit that you’ve started to go astray.
And what are we there for if not to solve these problems for you? That’s why this year we decided to offer you a totally different approach: instead of good resolutions we make a list of bad resolutions.
Obviously this is a list of things that are best to AVOID doing, but who knows, since always having your projected image made up of only virtue that you are unlikely to achieve doesn’t work very well, why not try the opposite route? Decide what you do NOT want to become, and not what you would very much like to be. And at the end we also put in a tip/trick, which could save everything. Shall we go? Let’s go.
Work out less
Commitments are already a pain, and you want to add to them? Working out is tiring and is another item on the endless list of things you MUST do. The key is to do it less and less, until you stop. You can do it!
Eating more
Life is already difficult and you have to compensate for the time you will save by not training. The time has come to finally eat more, without feeling guilty, without limits. And enough of all this health care, too, enough!
Sleep immoderately
This is perhaps the one bad habit that might as well turn out to be a good one, because sleep deprivation is one of the evils that plague us. Not having rules about it therefore may well prove beneficial. The problem is that the older you get, the harder it is to get much sleep but you will try!
Be selfish
Let’s also end all this caring for others, being helpful and kind. The Grinch will be your new role model. Or Epicurus, if you prefer. You must seek only your own personal pleasure and especially your own advantage. Be selfish and focused only on you, keep what gives you physical and mental satisfaction and let go of everything else. You deserve it!
Spoiled
Don’t mind the money you have or don’t have: spend it. Recent research shows that satisfaction is increased by 32 percent if you spend money you don’t even have. Not true, but who cares: you are in the exhilarating vortex of bad habits! Travel, spend, drink, smoke, overindulge in every way and don’t think about tomorrow. You thought about it all the time, and it didn’t help to give your life direction, did it? Fool the system! He wants you to have the illusion that planning it gives you control over the future, but instead that always does the opposite. It’s time to stop it!
Or.
Or observe one thing: Especially this last point-namely, not planning because fate does what it wants anyway-may contain a great truth. Have you ever wondered how your life would have turned out if you had never given it direction? Perhaps it would be much more inconclusive and messy. Perhaps, indeed, it would have no direction.
In short, this is what resolutions are for: they are not a program but they are a map. They report intermediate stations, destinations, destinations. They don’t tell you precisely that you will weigh a certain number of pounds that day or that you will have done this or that in that month-they just give you a direction. Good intentions are lighthouses to aim for but not to arrive at, not least because-as is well known-if you arrive at the lighthouse by sea it means you have crashed your ship on the rocks!
That said, here is the last real piece of advice.
The makeup
The secret to having a good relationship with good resolutions and perhaps being able to honor them is not to call them “good resolutions.” Okay, so what do we call them? Pine? Franca?
No: the idea comes from a very nice weekly newsletter (in English) that we recommend because it is always full of interesting insights and tips and is always very short. It is called Sunday Notes and is written by Barry Fralick.
What does Fralick recommend? To no longer call them “good resolutions” but “experiments.” If you think about it, the word “experiment” more loosely defines something that is attempted but also contains within itself the possibility of failure. The fact that it may not work is in its nature, and that is perfectly fine. If it works it is great news but if it doesn’t work nothing happens, it was expected.
So: good experiments for this 2023!