Image Credit: Compilation/Jennifer Stahn

For those of us who have already seen too many of them, the coming of another year can stir little enthusiasm. Every year I am invited to a New Year’s Eve party which turns into little more than an opportunity to watch people, old enough to behave better, drink themselves into an over-exuberance which involves celebrating the advancing years with fumbled sexual encounters followed by hangovers.

Perhaps the worst aspect of this sordid tradition is the New Year’s resolution, a harbinger of failure and self-loathing that none of us seem to learn from, ever. Despite decades of broken promises we once again fall headlong into the pit, believing with all our drunken hearts that THIS time it will work.

If you want to make your fortune in just a few months, buy a gym in November and sell it in February. In the first week of January there will be queue of pale and flabby middle-agers desperate to lock themselves into a usurious contract, egged on by the blatant lie they have told themselves that THIS year they WILL get fit. All you have to do is provide them with the “introductory session” in full confidence that your eager new customer will never sweat up the equipment again. As extra insurance they won’t come back, make sure that on the orientation day your gym is populated with tattooed muscle-bound body-builders whose presence alone will humiliate the flaccid into staying at home with their beer bellies and shame forever unthreatened.

The gym owners are not alone in cashing in on our self-deception: those modern-day snake oil salespersons peddling miracle diets will be busy fattening their bank accounts, and manufacturers of nicotine substitutes will be working overtime on behalf of the hopelessly addicted, whilst nonsensical self-improvement books will be flying off the shelves, briefly feeding the hopeless optimism before being discarded in the bathroom.

Of course, not everyone’s a winner: liquor-store salespeople will have to busy themselves playing cribbage in their echoing, empty stores, while concubines the world over will weep quietly in their boudoirs as their lovers return mournfully to their wives and children.

For those of us who decline to fool ourselves, life will briefly improve. The pubs will be void of clamorous drunks competing for the bartender’s attention; shopping will never have been easier; the price of chocolate will fall.

Enjoy it while you can. In a matter of near weeks the gyms will be left to the steroidal fanatics while the pubs will fill with dejected failures who have once again let themselves down with broken promises. The human memory being what it is, by spring they will have forgotten they ever tried to drink less, quit smoking, lose weight, exercise more or spend more time with their kiddies. By December 31st they will be ready to make the same mistake all over again.

The only New Year’s resolution that ever works is the New Year’s resolution to give up making New Year’s resolutions.

- The Grumpy Old Git is busy buying up marked down Christmas chocolate to sell at a profit outside his local gym.

News from © iNFOnews, 2015