Broke, hungover, lambless – the new year can only get better

So it’s New Year’s Day and you’ve just woken up in a friend’s bath covered in glitter and soup. Hurray. It’s 2016, and time to be getting on with your resolutions. People have been doing this for millennia. Back 4,000 years ago, the year’s end was when Babylonians promised their gods that they would return the things they borrowed and pay their debts, and 2,000 years ago it was when Roman gentry swore loyalty to the emperor.

Of course, these ancient people started their new year in late March, which makes sense. By that stage there’s an equal amount of light and dark in the day, and spring is promising new life and regrowth, and there are lambs everywhere. It’s harder to optimistically project change when everything’s dark and cold and everyone’s hungover and broke and lambless.

In Ireland, New Year’s Day is further complicated thanks to confusing local customs and superstitions. These include: treating babies born on New Year’s Day as harbingers of good fortune, and having a ridiculously restrictive door policy at parties. Tradition has it that if a dark-haired man – me, for example – is the first to cross the threshold, it’s a sign of good luck. However, a visiting red-haired woman – Bláthnaid Ní Chofaigh, say, or Julianne Moore – is seen as a bad omen and needs to be ejected from the home as soon as possible (quite a scene if it’s Ní Chofaigh, I can tell you).

Mad whims of fortune

What these and other year-ending folk traditions have in common is that they’re all about accepting the vagaries of fate and the mad whims of fortune. There’s no sense in old Ireland that you might in any way shape your own destiny (insert joke about the troika here).

Modern new year’s resolutions are, in fact, thought to be an Anglo-Saxon Protestant tradition. In 1951, the sociologist Isidor Thorner suggested that such customs were an offshoot of “Ascetic Protestantism”, specifically the Methodist watch night services in which 18th-century middle Englanders celebrated the oncoming new year with quiet reflection at church, rather than by dousing their shirtless bodies in gin while shouting “Yolo” at passing Garda cars, like you do.

Perhaps due to their religious origins, in the middle of the last century resolutions struck an altruistic tone. In 1947, according to a Gallup poll, the most common resolutions in the US were “improve my disposition, be more understanding, control my temper” and “improve my character; live a better life”. Contemporary resolutions, on the other hand, tend to focus less on the common good and more on naked self-interest and solipsistic self-improvement. The most common modern resolutions, whenever they’re surveyed, include promises to lose weight, gain promotion or to “enjoy life to the fullest”.

So, in today's more godless world, new year's resolutions represent an annual struggle with the self, and we usually lose. According to a 2007 study by Richard Wiseman at the University of Bristol, 88 per cent of resolutions falter. This is seemingly because of a surplus of ambition and a deficit of planning. So something like "write a little every day", which is achievable and has a plan baked into the aspiration, becomes, a bit more delusionally, "write epoch-changing novel". "Give money to charity" becomes "end poverty" and "join a community theatre group" becomes "direct Transformers V". I also suspect that, for a lot of people, their resolutions are hopeful shout-outs to the universe rather than real concrete commitments to change, which would, let's face it, require effort, planning and be quite hard.

Fears and vulnerabilities

Still, you can tell a lot about a person’s fears, vulnerabilities and world view by looking at their resolutions.

Susan Sontag began her 1972 diary with the words “kindness, kindness, kindness”, and 1977 with a flurry of good intentions: “I will get up every morning no later than eight (Can break this rule once a week)” and “I will answer letters once a week (Friday? – I have to go to the hospital anyway).” (Sontag was being treated for cancer at the time).

Friedrich Nietzsche, while killing off God in The Gay Science in 1882, also pledged that for the new year he would embrace positivity and celebrate the beauty in things. "I do not want to wage war with the ugly. I do not want to accuse, I do not want even to accuse the accusers. Looking aside, let that be my sole negation! And all in all, to sum up: I wish to be at any time hereafter only a yea-sayer!"

Marilyn Monroe in 1955 included a vow to attend Lee Strasberg’s acting classes, a promise to “take care of my instrument – personally & bodily (exercise)” and a heartbreaking commitment to go more regularly to analysis “to work on current problems and phobias that out of my past has arisen”.

And Woody Guthrie’s very long, doodle-strewn list from 1942 is striking in its diversity of aspirations. It features “wash teeth if any”, “read lot good books”, “beat fascism” and, most endearingly, “don’t get lonesome” and “keep hoping machine running”. *

* I found these famous people's resolutions on the excellent Brain Pickings website, created by Maria Popova, brainpickings.org