Happy New Year: Now sort your fucking life out

It'll keep on pissing itself away until you set goals.

Photo by Yevhenii Dubrovskyi on Unsplash

There's probably no greater example of our fickleness and vacuity than the way we treat new year's resolutions. Each year, the same superficial pantomime. You want a six pack. You want to look good in underwear. You buy a copy of Men's Health. It tells you that you can do it in six weeks if you eat fish and brown rice and turn into a cunt. Nine days later you catch the waft of a burger as you pass a restaurant and your short-lived sense of discipline collapses in on itself. And then the whole godawful cycle begins once more.

But here's the thing: new year's resolutions are great. They sound like proper basic-bitch stuff, the most normcore thing you could possibly do after buying a subscription to the Hallmark channel and investing in a really good vacuum cleaner. But they are in fact one of the only moments in which a true sense of existential purpose enters our daily lives. Underneath all the bullshit, they are an opportunity for an examined life.

God, we think. That number looks properly futuristic. 2025. That's the kind of year we were all expected to be digital avatars in the cyberpunk novels of my youth. How can it be the new year already, anyway, I feel like the last one only just started. And underneath all this chatter, all this isn't-it-funny stuff we share with our coworkers, is the terrible unspoken truth: It's all going terribly quickly isn't it? Life just pissing itself away. You're barely aware it's even happening and it'll all be over soon.

The older you get, the more noise there is. The more clutter. There is just so much stuff to get through: work, the school WhatsApp group, your fitness routine, the godforsaken admin, and then, hopefully, if you manage to secure some time, a catch-up with a friend, a romantic dinner with your partner in which you discover you've nothing left to say to each other, an hour alone to pursue your hobby. In that constant churn of stuff, it's hard to take the time to assess your life and what you're doing with it.

This is how you end up with an unexamined life - the exact thing the younger version of you promised herself would never happen. It's not through a cattle-like sense of mental limitation. It's because of the clutter. The meetings that should have been emails and the emails that should not have existed in the first place, and the twat in accounts who won't do their job and makes every simple operation an inexplicable strategic nightmare, and the constantly lengthening to-do list of filing a complaint about this to get money back for that, to tell the council about this so that you qualify for that, to make sure you child is enrolled for this,so that they can secure that. Somewhere in all that noise is the reason your life slipped away. It's the reason 2024 turned to 2025 without you really noticing, even though that number seems totally sci-fi and improbable.

There's something about new year, and specifically the shock of that numerical change. It can make us question what we're doing with our life and what we wish to improve. This is something we should do more of, not less. New year's resolutions are a good, wise, profound thing.

Sometimes the resolution can be very big. I was in a room with a bunch of people in their 40s the other day and realised that every single one of them was planning a major professional change. One was leaving corporate law to become a psychologist. Another was a London teacher who was going to work in a school in Thailand. One friend, who has proved to be one of the bravest and most determined people I know, started her career over at 40 in a completely different area. She sat with the kinds of 20-year-olds she used to manage and got them their coffee, right at the bottom rung of the ladder. She's had two promotions since and is now within touching distance of her dream job.

There's something about your 40s. It's too late, really. The big changes you're making now should have made at least a decade ago. But the thing is: You can still just about do it. It's still just about possible. It's pretty much your last chance for the professional life you dream of.

Most of the best new year's resolutions, however, are modest. They are small. They are achievable. They might be physical, or financial, or professional, or intellectual, or cultural. But they are possible, with a moderate amount of effort.

The key to most resolutions is 6am. This is the horrible goddamned truth of it. I despise this truth from the bottom of my heart. I want late nights in a Soho bar corner, guzzling whisky and getting too animated about an argument I can barely remember in the morning. I want people to eventually fuck off from my house in the early morning, and to put a record on and to just to lie there listening to it, feeling sated and woozy. I want to wake up late, and feel no guilt, and slowly make my way into the day. But the mortifying adult reality is that 6am is the moment of peak freedom.

Some people might find that midnight is the solution. Good luck to them. But for most of us it'll be 6am. It's before work starts. It’s before the other people in the house are up. It's before all the little things you need to do. There's at least an hour there, maybe two at a push. And those are the hours that you can do the things you need to do.

6am is your friend. It's time you can claim as your own. The world's tyranny is so severe, it's demands so endless and insistent, that the only way of defeating it and exercising some autonomy is to get out in front of it.

The key test of a resolution lies in the concept of rest. There are three elements to it: Rest free from anxiety, rest without guilt, and rest in its most authentic form. You can assess the quality of a life, in a very real sense, from the quality of the rest that composes it.

If your rest is interrupted by anxiety, it is a sign that a problem must be solved immediately. Sometimes you'll notice this because there is a weight in your stomach as you make dinner, a tug and churn at your guts - not severe, but lasting. Sometimes you find that you have woken at 4am. Your background thoughts have turned to this matter and the stress over them has started your mind whirring. Sometimes the problem is very small. It doesn't matter.

This happens to me whenever I can't control something. I have dealt with big, serious problems without any sense of anxiety, simply because they've been in my control. But as soon as something affects me but is decided elsewhere, by other people, who may or may not be competent, I experience anxiety: a broiling sense of internal turnover, like someone's kneading my soul.

These matters must be prioritised. It doesn't matter how petty they are. Break them down, find solutions, implement, achieve progress, no matter how slow. If this is you, this should be your new year's resolution. It doesn’t matter that it seems pedestrian and humdrum. It isn’t. Your real resolution is a serene life. This is just the method you are using to achieve it.

Guilt over rest is far more serious. This is a sign that the bullshit of the world has overtaken your life: the work that needs to be done, the admin that needs to be discharged, the odd jobs that need to be completed. All the crushing tiny requirements that, in sum, will negate you.

After a while you grow so used to these demands that you assume you should always be dealing with them. Or you fail to resolve them so persistently that they are allowed to build up without opposition. Or, worst of all, you forget that they are a distraction from the best things in life and fool yourself into thinking that they actually constitute life.

If you feel guilty about resting, something has gone wrong. Your resolution should be about how you satisfy yourself with your responsibilities and obligations, so that you can justifiably rest. What needs to be done so that you can sit down for a couple hours at the end of a day and feel you deserve it? What must be accomplished to validate your relaxation? Whatever the answer is: that's your resolution.

And then, finally, there is the sense of authentic rest. This is the true rest, its Platonic form. It is not a luxury, or a form of hedonism. Quite the opposite. It is the product of work. And it is a necessary condition of it.

One of the things we notice at new years is how quickly time seems to go now that we're adults. I remember turning 18 and I could hardly believe how long it had taken. I was overawed by how much life there was, the sheer quantity of it. And it's true. It's a damn sight more true that the notion we have now that life is terribly short. What changes is our experience of time. And this is a function of how thoroughly we are living life.

When you are young, you are learning things all the time. School stuff, sure, but also life experience, embarrassment, triumph, love, disdain, shyness, confidence, popularity, alienation, your natural group, your internal disposition. It's the furnace of formative experience. Time seems to stretch because we're fitting so much into it. Our brains are doing so much work.

You can feel the same thing now if you're on holiday. Perhaps not a beach resort holiday, where you do the same thing day after day, but a holiday in a foreign city - somewhere where you don't know the language or where to buy phone credit, where all the little things that compose a day are made much harder. Suddenly time stretches out once more, as it did when you were young. Days take weeks. Weeks feels as long as a month.

Why? Because you're figuring so much out. Usually, life isn't like this. We just go through the motions. We know how to top up our phone. We know the route home. We know the pub we always go to with our friend, and how to get there, and what we'll order, and the TV programme we'll watch when we get home. And because we keep doing the same things over and over, our brains stop noticing it, we stop being present, and time suddenly feels like it's going terribly quickly. And then, pop, that's your life mate. That's your life over.

Variety can come through changed experience, but it can also come through proper work - through doing things which exhaust us.

A few years back, I was travelling in Chile. For a couple of weeks I was speaking only in Spanish. This had never really happened to me before. I'd only ever spoken Spanish with people who also spoke English. I could resort to my native tongue if needed. This time, I was restricted. Every sentence would involve my brain jogging ahead of the words to assess any gaps in my language and whether I could make my point the long way round, by using some other phrase. At night, shattered, I typically fell asleep around 8pm. I simply couldn't stay up later. But even though the days were short, they felt long. Time stretched out into the distance.

I get a modest version of the same thing when I'm writing a book. At some point in the process, it begins to dominate almost all your thinking. There is no point your mind is at rest. Instead, it starts to structure, to process, to resolve. Oh yes, you think, that point can go in the previous chapter and it sorts out the structure of the following one. This argument is contradicted by that thing I put in the prologue, I need to resolve that or perhaps cover it up. If I'm going to make this observation over here, I need to add something at the start to foreshadow it. There's all this intellectual labour, involving the argument itself, all the things you need to organise, the structure of the work and how it's written. At night, shattered, I typically fall asleep around 10pm. I try to stay awake later. I can't. And once again, time stretches out.

Why do we get so tired at these moments? Because we did proper work. It can be speaking a foreign language, or doing a big work project, or learning your way around a new city. But that rest is the rest of the virtuous. It is the rest you get when time suddenly feels slow again, when you have held back the wheel. It is the greatest rest you will ever have,.

I'm not suggesting that this should be the case all the time. But it should be a part of your life. It should be something you have experienced recently, are experiencing, or will experience again in due course. If not, that project should be your resolution.

This is the moment really. Think about it deeply. The choices you make in this period - big or small, superficial or profound - can change your life. Make the right ones. Fuck your six pack.