New Year's Resolutions You Can Keep

Every year, people make resolutions. They resolve to change bad habits. Then, they fail. I have a better idea. Why not resolve bad thinking?

Bad thinking messes up your life way more than you realize. People have the wrong ideas about things, and it leads to making wrong choices or simply being unhappy. So, here are some resolutions that you can keep.

1. Stop envying lucky people.

When you see someone who has succeeded in an endeavor, you need to ask yourself one question. Was their success a product of luck or virtue? It makes a big difference. Trust me.

Imagine a lottery winner. He has won the $300 million jackpot in the Powerball. Upon winning, he declares to the world that he is going to take his entire fortune and buy more lottery tickets. At this moment, you would see this lottery winner for the colossal fool that he is. But what made him brilliant before this? He was just lucky.

Luck makes fools look brilliant and smart people look foolish. It is one thing to be brilliant and hard working and establish a Fortune 500 company. It is another thing to inherit that company simply because your dad owned the outfit and croaked. The irony is that both prospered largely from lucky breaks. For the dad, it might have been securing a government contract because he was friends with a politician. For the son, it was simply being born.

Luck plays a large role in extraordinary success. It is one thing to be a world class athlete. That takes talent but also a great deal of work. It is another thing to be a ginormous rock star with a drug addiction and a handler to make sure you show up for the show. We admire the athlete and lampoon the rock star. From this, we see that success visits both the virtuous and the slimeballs in equal measure.

Ordinary success is that success that is earned by repeatable virtuous endeavor. This is the achievement of the marathon runner who sets a new PR, or the blue collar worker who saves his money and buys a house. Extraordinary success is nonrepeatable and due largely to luck. This is the movie star with the lucky break or one of the Jonas Brothers. They might practice their crafts with diligence but so do cameramen and music teachers, but no one is paying them a million dollars merely to look good. The people to admire are those with ordinary success. They deserve it.

2. Stop being vain.

In my twenties, I noticed my hairline was receding. It didn't bother me that much because I don't like hair anyway. Then, I shaved my head. It didn't improve my looks one bit. But it did liberate me. Shaving your head is an act of defiance. This is why people who have no hair loss at all elect to do the same thing.

You don't need to shave your head to stop being vain, but you should accept the way you are. This is because beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Despite getting uglier, women noticed me more after I shaved the melon. Many a female hand has run across this dome, and I am at a loss to explain it. There is no science to it. People like what they like. Therefore, it behooves you to like yourself exactly as you are. As you get older and uglier, this self-acceptance will become your strength. I find that the most beautiful people are the ones who wear their wrinkles, scars, and gray hair with pride.

3. Realize that your life belongs to you and no one else.

Whenever I run into some bitter geriatric, they always want to give me advice and tell me what the fuck to do. This is because as a single man with no kids I have a ton of options at my disposal, and these fuckers envy this. They want to hit the reset button on their lives and get a "do over." This is fucking sad. It is also damn annoying.

Your life belongs to you. It does not belong to me or anyone else. I can dispense information if you ask me, but your choices are your own. Never let other people run your life for you. And if you are one of those busybodies wanting to run the lives of others, do everyone a favor and mind your own fucking business.

4. Relinquish control over your reputation. It doesn't belong to you.

You can try and manage your reputation the way Tiger Woods did with his, but your reputation is not your property. It belongs to other people, and there is nothing you can do about it. As someone who has been the subject of countless rumors, gossip, innuendo, and the like, I can tell you that there is little you can do about your reputation. It also doesn't help when you fuel the bad press by lying about infidelities, drunkenness, drug abuse, sex orgies, and the like. I am prone to doing this just to confuse things as much as possible. The result is that when people actually get to know me, they are pleasantly surprised. I'm not nearly as diabolical as my detractors claim.

You can't control what others think about you. Just learn to shrug it off or even have a laugh at it like I do.

5. Eschew status.

People are very conscious of status. This usually involves four things:

-Educational attainment
-Income
-Size, location, and style of home
-Brand and cost of automobile

Status is a colossal waste. I'm not sure why people engage in it. I could understand if it made a real difference in the quality of life, but it doesn't. Stephen Hawking is way smarter than me, but I can walk and wipe my own ass. I think he would trade with me if he could. I would never trade with him.

The poor living in America today enjoy a lifestyle rivaling anything Queen Victoria had. In addition, the quality of Bill Gates's life is indistinguishable from yours or mine. He still watches the same crappy movies I do, but I suspect he might use an iMac instead of a Dell. He might get to eat some delicacy like sauteed bird poop, but I will stick with my grilled chicken. I suspect Gates eats grilled chicken, too. His house and car are probably way more beautiful than my shit, but I still travel and remain warm and dry in my home. I grant that he probably flies on a private jet while I am stuck in coach. Otherwise, his life is not much different than mine except for that iMac.

Status is a social thing, and that's it. It has a greater impact on other people's lives than your own. This is because it makes them hate the good things they have. Yet, I have met people with high status who envied the simple lifestyles of people who worked for them. If you are able to sleep at night without being interrupted by a phone call or nightmares of financial reversal, you have one of the best lives possible. As one writer put it, people work and save for their whole lives to retire to the simple life already enjoyed by poor fishermen in tropical regions.

Status is a poor subsitute for happiness.

6. Become indifferent to pleasure and pain.

Most of our bad habits stem from wanting to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Hedonists seek an abundance of pleasure while ascetics seek a life of pain. Both are erroneous states. The better path is the path of syzygy (a pair of opposites) where you live with both states. A good example of this would be hitting the weights hard at the gym and then enjoying a steak and a nap.

Pleasure is not happiness, and pain is not misery. In addition, pleasure and pain go together. Indulge in too much pleasure, and you end up in pain. Endure pain, and the pleasure becomes sweeter. This is why Gatorade tastes so good after mowing the lawn on a hot day instead of before. This principle is why we should have equal measures of both exertion and rest. People who adhere to exercise routines follow this pattern. People who do not exercise deny themselves sublime pleasures.

Conclusion

These are changes in thinking not habits. If they take hold, they should result in habit changes. But it takes no effort to change your mindset. You simply dwell on it and let the ideas change your mind.

Happy New Year.

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