Resolutions are for people who have flaws and fallibilities, never mind the rest of us
It’s that time of the year again!
Like our calendar, our resolutions also have European roots. January, derived from the name of a Roman God Janus, represents the month when Romans would promise the God to be on their best behaviour, which back then was displayed by paying their debts and returning ‘borrowed’ objects. Janus is one of Rome’s rare own Gods, with no counterpart in Greece. Depicted as the god of transition, Janus is imagined to have two faces – one looking back at history, and the other facing forward, into the realms of future. (Given such mythological powers, which direction would you look?)
On that note, here are some of our inspirations for setting resolutions for the year!
On setting atomic goals, from Veritasium.
And on setting supersized themes instead, from CGP Grey: (Clearly I couldn’t make up my mind on which one works better and chose the lazy way out by leaving the readers to decide).
Whatever your resolutions are, one recommendation from us is to have regular check-ins to see how you’re tracking and adjust the goals accordingly. This app has worked well for half of us who’ve tried it.
How do you plan to send wishes for the new year? What do the wishes mean grammatically, and behaviorally (I think):
- Happy New Year!
- Only valid for Jan 1, or a few weeks in January for the perpetually tardy.
- Happy new year!
- The more generous wish – here’s to wishing 364 times more fun than the folks above.
- Happy New Year’s!
- New Year’s what?
- Happy New Years!
- Talk about being generous! They’re wishing a wonderful rest of your life (whether that means they never intend to ever meet you again, we don’t know).
- Happy 2023!
- We see what you did there. Smart.
- I don’t partake in such trivialities of humankind. I’ll abstain.
- Delete their contact.
This post is from a new substack: https://andaboutthat.substack.com/
- Delete their contact.
Perplexed Potatoes 