I turn to anyone making New Year resolutions with a kind of baffled fury Where have you been for the past 6 years? What has insulated you from the world so successfully that you still have the resources to be contemplating such a thing? ✒️ LucyMangan
Lucy Mangan: ‘Resolutions stand now with middle-class millennials busily defining the practices of wellness gurus’
I have a friend who is one of those perfect people you generally try to read about only in magazines or watch in particularly unchallenging romcoms: a slim, groomed, healthy-eating, fully-exercised, charity volunteer. So perfect is she that I was, about 10 years ago, intrigued to know what her New Year’s resolution would be.
“I’m giving up novels,” she replied. This would leave time for more educational non-fiction, you see, and be good for the mind inside that already fully optimised-for-use body. Back then, I was in awe of the precision engineering of life this demonstrated – the ambition, the relentless pursuit of perfection, the aura of golden aspirational splendour it created around her. What savvy! What discipline! What altogether godlike powers in one who walked this Earth!Times change and we change with them. And things – I don’t know if you’ve noticed – are a lot worse now than they were a decade ago.
At such a time, I turn to anyone with the wherewithal to be making New Year resolutions with a kind of baffled fury.