Over the years, human beings have come up with an increasing amount of ways to inflict physical and emotional torture upon themselves. And once a year, like clockwork, the most masochistic among our species resolve to subject themselves to any number of agonies at once. The most common of these miseries are deprivation (otherwise known as ‘Dieting’ and ‘Quitting’) and strenuous and repeated physical torture (which also goes by the shudder inducing alias of ‘Exercising’). Collectively, it is called ‘New Year’s Resolutions’.
Luckily this particular strain of annual madness is an extremely fleeting condition for the majority of sufferers. Mere days – but often it only takes a few hours – after drunkenly/giddily vowing to yourself (or, regrettably, to one of more others) that you’ll give up all your vices on New Year’s Day, most people return to their slothful, gluttonous and addicted ways.
This common inability to stick to overly ambitious resolutions often lead to feelings of failure, self-loathing, depression and general worthlessness. And yet, twelve months later, most of the sufferers experience a type of amnesia and repeat the entire futile process all over again.
Apparently we have the Babylonians to blame for this annual ritual. Four thousand years ago, it was a popular New Year’s resolution in Babylon to return something you had borrowed from someone the year before. A perfectly attainable goal! (Unless of course the person you had borrowed the item from had since moved to a different continent.) Unfortunately most modern people set themselves up for failure by making resolutions that will test their will power to the breaking point.
With 2010 merely days old, we want to know: have you made any resolutions for this coming year? If so, what do you (or, in the event that you’ve not followed through, what did you) want to accomplish? If you have already fallen off the wagon, how long did you manage to keep your resolution/s? In case you are still hanging in there, how do you plan to stick to it? Let us know in the comments, skatties!
