I noted on X yesterday that every January first, the media and indeed the wider social culture turns on a sixpence like Lionel Messi in his prime: After weeks and weeks of ads on your television showing steaming desserts getting liberally drizzled with chocolate sauce, January first marks the day when the message switches to “get in shape, you fat slob”, and the advertising switches to running shoes and half-price gym memberships. The message is that you must now repay your month of wintry indulgence with a long spring of misery and discontent.
The ancient roots of this are interesting, as it happens: The Christmas and New Year period, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, have long been associated with the Sun and the winter solistice. Before Christ, there was Sol Invictus – the Roman God of the Sun whose holiday was December 21st. The Babylonian Talmud, which is the elder of the two foundational Jewish texts, records that the gentiles of the Middle East would celebrate at this time of year “the turning of the Sun” – the moment when the days get longer rather than shorter.
The point is that for almost as long as we’ve been recording history, human beings have assigned a religious significance to the time of year when the days start to lengthen again. Those are the roots of “the new year”. And with them, the impulse for “new beginnings”. Springtime is a time for renewal and growth.
I have a friend who is certainly not unique in her habit for reading books about self-improvement. Some of them are classics, like the great tracts of philosophy. Others are more recent, written by those quacks who make a name for themselves telling us all how to be happier and more content in ourselves. I myself have read several, and it would be a lie to say they are always useless or that they always lack merit. The essential human virtues of tolerance, self-discipline, stoicism and so on are unchanged and always worth reminding ourselves of.
What does lack merit, however, is “new year, new me”. There is frankly no worse time of the year to try and reinvent yourself.
If I might be permitted a detour into whimsical observation, I would note that life is short and largely rigged against us by our own bodies, which become steadily more useless at the things we need them to do just as we acquire the experience needed to do those things better. This is why sporting elitism is so prized: Those few people who make it to the top of the sporting world manage to combine the peak of their careers with the youth needed to enjoy that peak. The older you get, the more things you learn that you wish you’d known in your twenties.
The other observation I’d make is that we live in an era of passive unhappiness: Since humanity in the west has largely evolved past real existential problems like famine, wars, and the black death, and since we all live relatively comfortable lives, we have largely resorted to inventing existential problems about ourselves to worry about. One of the worst election slogans of recent history summed that up very well: The UK Tory Party’s 2005 election campaign under Michael Howard, which decided to ask the voters: “But, are you happy?”
It is a ridiculous question because happiness is a transient and unusual state. Were we all to experience it constantly, it would not be happiness, but normality. The more realistic state of being – the one to which we should in my estimation aspire – is contentment. The state of being relatively satisfied with one’s existence.
This is where I will do something unusual for a committed capitalist, and critique capitalism. The biggest issue with capitalism is that for it to work, it depends on our discontent and requires us to feel discontented. It sells happiness and contentment as a product, whether that product be cosmetic or mechanical. Women are told they will be happier with a particular handbag or silky flowing hair or cosmetically enhanced breasts, and men are told they will be happier with a new Mercedes or a brand of shirts that flatters their arms or two stone less body fat.
What it’s all about, of course, is feeding on our insecurities about ourselves and how we are perceived by others.
There are of course people who make big changes in their lives and are the better for it. A friend, an alcoholic, transformed his life some years ago by giving up the booze entirely. More common, sadly, are those who try the big dramatic change and make their lives worse, or who try and fail after a few months and then feel like failures.
Chances are, if you’ve reached the age of the median Gript reader (in your mid 30s) then most of your habits and preferences are already formed and fixed. You are not suddenly going to turn into Brad Pitt or Keira Knightly. You certainly are not going to do it in January.
For many of us, the coming month is the hardest of the year. It drags on, and by the end of it many people will be counting the days to payday. The weather will be predictably awful. Now is not the time to pile more misery on yourself, and those around you, by undertaking some massive change in your life.
Just procrastinate, like a normal person. And be contented to wait until the next round of advertising, in May, when the capitalists start telling the female of the species to get “bikini body ready”, or whatever the politically correct version of that nonsense is these days.