Here we are, halfway through the year, in the midst of a perfect chance to point out that “New Year’s Resolutions” is one of the most dangerously misleading phrases ever framed in the English language. Hearing that insidious collection of words often enough is probably responsible for planting a dangerous idea in some people’s subconscious minds — the notion that January 1 is the only true, correct, and valid time for renewal.

It just might be one of those little kernels or nuggets of an idea that gets lodged in the brain early, and remains there unless a purposeful effort is made to drag it into the daylight and interrogate it. Otherwise, left to gather strength in the dark, it can be responsible for enormous harm.

Probably any person of average intelligence, if confronted with a genuine necessity to fully examine the concept, would pass harsh judgment. Out of well-nigh 400 days in a year, the idea that a person could only start over on just one of them is silly.

But unless it is dragged into the light and ruthlessly examined, a dumb idea can remain lodged in there somewhere, and solidify into an unconscious assumption, an intruder that will never be evicted unless it is first recognized and acknowledged. It’s all too easy to kid oneself, to think “Oh dang, here we are halfway through the calendar already, and I know I messed up. Too late now. Might as well just wait until January and really try hard to stick to it next time.”

To put off the unpleasant chore, and compensate for it by promising to, when the day of reckoning arrives, do a really bang-up job of it — that is one of the little tricks we play on ourselves, a practice otherwise known as self-sabotage.

But no. Let’s not do that. Let’s not engage in lazy thinking. Let’s quit making excuses or projecting good intentions into a future that is half a year away. That is just pitiful.

A great starting point would be to review some of the reminders right here on this site, in the form of essays about the dangers of lying to oneself. Everyone needs a hobby — why not hunt out the cognitive distortion in our own heads, and chase it down, and teach it to sit up and take notice?

Of all the sorts of deception, self-deception is arguably the very worst kind, because it is totally avoidable. It’s one of the areas where we can actually “just say no,” and better yet, there are specialists around who would love to teach us how to do that. Rather than present a counselor with a vague problem like, “My life is messed up,” try a focused approach, like, “Teach me how to not lie to myself.” If you don’t get the answer there, keep looking.

A person might find that the difficulty is not as serious as actual deception, but attributable to a quality closer to simple inertia. There is such a phenomenon as lazy thinking, which is why so many excellent humans have specialized in figuring out how to do it better, even far back beyond ancient Greece and Rome.

The pursuit of logic, which can lead to accurate and correct thought processes, is one of the oldest quests to which the human mind dedicated itself. We don’t have to all be Socrates or Einstein, but to make the best use of our most important organ is still a fairly worthy endeavor.

As somebody once said, “You can fool some of the people all the time, and all the people some of the time, but you can’t fool yourself.” Really, not. Even if it seems to be working. Even if you’ve got yourself 99% hornswoggled, that one percent of truth is lurking, waiting patiently for you to embrace it.

And as Craig Ferguson said after 15 sober years,

Sometimes I wonder if I could get away with drinking now. I totally subscribe to the notion that alcoholism is a mental illness because thinking like that is clearly insane.

Written by Pat Hartman. First published June 25, 2026.

Source:

“Craig Ferguson 2007 Sobriety monologue,” YouTube.com, February 18, 2012.

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