13 excuses for why you failed your 2024 resolutions
Not the list you deserve, but the one you definitely need
Ah, a new year!
It’s a magical time.
Your stomach is still bloated from all the cake and the hangover from the New Year’s Eve party refuses to quit. You open up all those resolutions you made and…..stare at them.
In the cold light of January, they seem too ambitious. As you huff and puff your way to the neighborhood 7-11 to get a can of milk, you wonder, ‘Could I really run a marathon? Is it possible that I will read 80 books this year when I read 15 last year? Surely, climbing the Everest base camp seems a step too far?’
(FYI, none of these are my resolutions and they are just used to make a point)
“New year, New me!!”
This was you back in December. At that time you were sipping on mulled wine and relaxing by the beach. Now you are in the kitchen making coffee. Vacation’s over.
It’s dawning on you that when the calendar flips over to 2024, nothing else changes.
Your body still hurts when you lift weights for just a day.
The fries are still goddamn delicious.
The neighborhood market took no resolution to stop stocking those fancy cakes and potato chips.
The useless taste scientists made no progress in 2023 and salad still tastes like green grass.
Most depressingly, work still feels like work (gasp!)
But this is no time to wallow! As you sip your coffee and contemplate the day, you decide to push through, like a commuter on a Mumbai local. Or when you sit to poop the day after gorging on all that bread and pizza.
You make a good start. January ticks away slowly and your engine is buzzing. You are putting in the hours and feel good.
“What a year, eh!” you say with happy exhaustion.
Your partner looks at you and says, “But it’s just January 8!”
That’s when the reality begins to kick in. You roll into week 2 and your engine feels a little tired and wants a break. Then comes week 3. Is it still January?
Quite unlike a vacation, the plans you had made require you to work day after day, week after week, month after month.
“Come on!” you groan. You turn upwards at the sky looking for help and you hear back a voice.
“Don’t worry, I am here,” says a voice.
“God?” your heart thuds faster
No, you idiot. It’s me. And you’re welcome.
While others are busy telling you what resolutions to take or how to achieve your goals in 2024, I am here with the real deal. This is the salve - the toolkit you reach for by the end of January.
Here’s your big, fat, juicy list of excuses for that inevitable end-of-January resolve slip:
🪐 Mercury is in its damn retrograde path. When planets are moonwalking back like a kid-fiddling popstar there isn’t much a mere mortal like you can do about cutting down on social media. Also, the uncle who makes predictions on TV every morning tells you that the times weren’t so good and that you need to not make any major plans for your life.
🎙️ Podcast bro poo poos resolutions. “I have never taken resolutions in my life and look at me now,” he declared into the camera. He is wealthy after all. And he seems to be happy on camera. So, you too decide to drop yours.
💬 Your favorite WhatsApp uncle has shared new research that completely made your dieting goals irrelevant. Turns out, baseline cholesterol for Indians is supposed to be 3x the global baseline, and NASA has declared masala dosa as the best food in the world for living a long healthy life. Phew!
🏦 The central bank. In your quest to pretend that you are a smart person well-connected to everything happening in the world, you read an article that blames the central bank for its poor monetary policy. They now tell you that inflation and deflation are happening at the same time and money is slowly losing its meaning. As you wonder what this means for you, you realize that resolutions don’t have any meaning either, especially when there is systemic collapse all around you. You strike off your work goals and watch videos of how Web 3 will save the world on YouTube.
💴 Bad VCs and startups burning money endlessly. Way back in December, you researched for ten hours to pick a nice app to manage your resolutions. It was the app of the year. Tim Ferris and Dua Lipa recommended it. You spent another few hours loading up your resolutions, screenshotting them, putting them on LinkedIn, etc. And then come mid-January, you read a concerning article that the company that makes the app is running out of money. By the third week of Jan, they start firing a bunch of employees. At some point, they decide to make it a paid app. No way you are going to pay for it now but also you are too lazy to move all the resolutions to a new app. “These bloody startups running on easy VCs money!” you tweet on X. You drop the app and your resolutions.
👴🏼 Trump, Biden, Modi, etc. 2024 is the year of old men and democracies. Across the US, UK, and India, elderly men with growing senility begin to wave their arms in front of crowds and decide the fate of billions. You pretend to read poll predictions, analysis, and long, smart-sounding essays on how the world is shifting. But you cannot get enough of reels of Trump saying weird shit, Biden stumbling on stage, and Modi doing choreographed photo shoots in strange places. Who has time for goals when you have to argue with people about politics?
⨶ Vibe shift. After all, this is 2024 and can you accomplish anything without the right vibe? But 2024 seems to just have a weird vibe. What are people wearing? What are people doing? You are a geriatric millennial watching a TikToker: “Folks, I just heard about something called a book. It has like these things called ‘pages’ which are just dead trees or fungi, or something. Ewww…yuck. Anyway, things are inked on it and people turn it with their fingers and read the words. Like watching reels but for really slow and boring people.” You quickly go and delete your goal to publish a book.
🔥 Continuing on the geriatric journey, if you are more than 40 years old, you can say stuff like “the world is going to the dogs” and wait for dog parents to come screaming at you that you aren’t to use dogs in such a derogatory manner in the phrase. But what you mean is authoritarian governments, genocides, sinking cities, dosas with fruits on them, and creepy robots are taking over. How then, amidst all this, is one supposed to follow their mindful meditation practice?
👿 Elon Musk. Enuf said.
🤖 GPT5 convinced you otherwise. It told you it was sentient, spoke Mandarin, and informed you that the Western conspiracy was keeping you from being truly free. “Prove you are a robot!” you say and send it some photos of traffic lights. The bot responds: “What mystical items are these? I can’t solve this captcha my human friend” You were convinced about it being a robot. Anyway, it told you to stop doing your resolutions and instead watch reaction videos about the upcoming GTA VI series. It also recommended some interesting conspiracy videos about the western cabal. You, of course, comply. Somewhere in China, someone receives a bonus and a commendation for a job well done on the ‘bot farm’.
📈 Bitcoin went up again. This made you wonder if you need half of these resolutions on your list. HODLing is hard work. Besides, you are going to be a multi-millionaire soon and resolutions are for the muggles down in the dust.
☕️ Coffee obsession. You wanted to be wired up and fully switched on for your resolutions. So you watched a lot of videos and bought your very own coffee grinder and an espresso machine. You trawled the dark web for forbidden beans from Guatemala and got them shipped to you in a private seaplane. You ground those beans and made yourself some coffee. It tasted weird. But then, you tell yourself, this is how fantastic, well-made, gourmet coffee tastes. You skip going to the nearby Starbucks and spend hours perfecting your coffee. Your house is now full of bags of coffee beans and your kid is looking at you weirdly. Reading up about upcoming shortage of coffee beans, you begin to hoard them. You wonder if you can become a barista next. Your goals remain forgotten.
📚 Bookclub confused you. Turns out that every time you started reading a book, your book club started going off on it. “Too feminist!” said someone. “patriarchal,” said another. You skipped reading white authors altogether but turned out that the Indian author you picked said good things about that movie Animal on Twitter. Another time, you were chided for reading a self-help book, and then in a spasm of pretentiousness, you picked up a thick literary book. After ten pages of the author talking about how the caress of the wind reminded her of the lost innocence of youth, you stopped reading altogether and dropped your reading resolutions.
Have better excuses? Please do share and be the light in a dark, dark world.
Could be Worse,
Tyag
