If there is one thing I’ve learnt during my time on this earth, it’s that a crippling hangover is rarely a reliable aide to making good life decisions. Notably, endearingly optimistic New Year’s resolutions are no exception to this rule.

If your New Year’s traditions are anything like mine, you will regain consciousness at about 3pm on New Year’s Day, already jaded thinking about the go-getters making the most of their overpriced new gym memberships. When you finally arise, still wine drunk and with your throat sore from screaming “THIS WILL BE MY YEAR” into your cup of Bargain Booze sauvignon, it can be tempting to scribble down some ambitious resolutions in one of the 17 notebooks you received for Christmas. But really, I wouldn’t bother.

My success at keeping New Year’s resolutions is probably best represented by the fact that I’m currently struggling to remember any of the ones I made at the beginning of 2016. Eat less chocolate, probably. More exercise too, I suspect. A jumble of promises committing myself to doing less of what I enjoyed and more of what I endured, with the expectation that the end result would somehow be a happier me.

To the more proactive reader, my disdain for resolutions probably just reads like a bitter person attempting to shelter herself from yet another year of failure – but it’s really not that.

Okay, so maybe it’s partly that. But it’s other stuff, too.

Like the majority of festive traditions, New Year’s has become ever more extravagant and excessive. Even resolutions themselves have become commercialised; adverts are everywhere for ‘12 months of gym membership for the price of 10!’ or ‘free skincare gift worth £30 if you sell a kidney in order to afford anything else at this counter!’. At least if we have another god-awful year, we can do it while being thin and spot-free.

 “At least if we have another god-awful year, we can do it while being thin and spot-free.”

As we allow the importance of New Year’s resolutions to get ever more overblown, they get more competitive, too. The resolutions become less about what might bring about a sense of fulfilment in our lives, and more about what extraordinary inconvenience we can claim to be adopting in order to rake in a bumper quantity of Facebook likes; I see one old school friend is going gluten-free this year. Another is going vegan. I better go all-in and commit to subsisting on merely dust and discarded newspapers for the next 365 days lest anybody question my moral resolve. 

While there’s nothing wrong with a little optimistic ambition – most of us wouldn’t be at Cambridge without it – it can be fairly detrimental to place so much significance on the date that you begin a big change in your life. 

For most of my teenage and adult life, I’ve been planning a diet that will definitely, definitely, start next Monday. Or the Monday after that, because I’ve got a fancy dinner on Wednesday. Oh, and drinks with the girls next Tuesday, so I better start the week after that. Ad infinitum. Until then, that seems good justification for eating a whole packet of biscuits every day, to ensure I enjoy freedom while it lasts.

All I Want for Christmas is world peace. Oh, and space on the bus

If you can see the problem with that logic (I’m still sticking to it as an effective weight control strategy, mind), you should be able to see the absurdity of New Year’s resolutions. Missing one day of jogging on January 4th does not mean you need to relinquish all ambition until 2018. Stop weeping into your ridiculous lycra clothing and accept that the importance lies in the personal challenge, not the time of year.

While reflection on the past year can be considered inevitable, my aim this year is to make it a review of my successes, not an assessment of my flaws (after all, a girl’s only got so much time). We should learn celebrate not only the fresh start, but what we’re leaving behind – no matter how much of a shitstain on history you view 2016 to have been. We lived, we drank, we studied (well, some of you did), and we survived. And we did so as the horribly flawed and intolerable people we already are. This year, I’ll raise a glass to celebrating myself exactly as I am. This really will be my year