The invisible, immortal Priest of Time

So, here we are – a ‘New Year’, an arbitrary adjectival assignation to a passage of time that allows us to pretend we have a blank slate, that the excesses of Christmas, the sins of omission and commission of the past 365 days have been absolved by the invisible, immortal Priest of Time.

You know what? Once you’ve crawled out from under your hangover, you’ll be stumbling into exactly the same shitty life you were living on December 31st. Exactly the same bombed-out mediocrity that you’ve been wallowing in for the past 8,760 hours of your rapidly-diminishing life.

“Call me but Romeo, and I be new baptis’d”, exclaims Shakespeare’s doomed hero.

Only he’s not, and neither are you. None of us get a free pass on our mistakes and misdeeds.

New Year is an illusion – firstly, an illusion that we can control time, that it flows as we dictate, and, secondly, an illusion that we can ever completely change, or ever be allowed to entirely reinvent ourselves. And the ultimate lie that paints this illusion as reality? New Year’s resolutions.

If you actually were going to lose weight/stop something/start something/get a new job, you’d’ve done it by now. Apart from getting the job, for example. Which leads me nicely into my next point – the fact that it is completely moronic and self-defeating to set resolutions that rely, in some way, on other people.

You’re setting yourself up for failure if you hang the future of the next 365 days on an action, or course of actions, that only someone else can take. People are capricious, mercurial beings, and very rarely behave as we would like them to. By all means apply for as many jobs that interest you as you can, rework your CV, take some courses that will make it – and therefore you – look better to potential employers, but don’t, whatever you do, make a New Year’s resolution to “get a new job”. In fact, don’t make a New Year’s resolution to do anything.

Without the impetus and frowning judgement of New Year’s resolutions looking over my shoulder, I’ve managed to buy my first house, get engaged (and set a date for the wedding), and “write more” – that vague resolution of scribblers everywhere. Vague, and easily achievable – basically, total up all the words you wrote last year, then write one more. There. You’ve achieved your resolution to “write more”.

The one resolution you perhaps should make is to read more scathing sarcasm. There’s plenty of it on the internet – sit down, leave FaceCrap and TwatALot alone for a bit, and instead have a look around for your particular brand of sarcasm.

2 thoughts on “The invisible, immortal Priest of Time

  1. My New Year’s resolution was to take DMT, and I did it within 3 hours of 2015. Check! Feeling pretty relaxed about the rest of the year.

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