We live in an increasingly unprecedented world where few things are certain, yet one thing which will always remain predictable is the boredom of dour New Year’s discourse. For the first few weeks of the year, we collectively must endure the indignity of this discourse, which invariably takes the form of one or more of the following: “I’m doing veganuary”, “I’m going to the gym”, “I’m going to get really into meditating”, “I blocked them”.
And because I believe we are, at heart, good people, because we want to be kind to others, we nod along to these proclamations and pretend to believe them, however paper thin their resolve might be. But really, they will all be abandoned by February, if not before. We only make these proclamations in the first place because there is something oppressive about the beginning of January, when, hungover and listless from Christmas and too much time off from our actual lives, we are briefly desperate to instil meaning and seize control over out destinies by mapping out the next 12 months.
And this particular year, that feels more potent than usual. Perhaps that’s because a year of geopolitical and climate madness has made it clearer than ever that some things, as we careen around the sun, are simply out of our control. Perhaps because we don’t know what the future holds collectively, we are more frantic than before about deciding what we want in our own personal lives. Maybe this is one the reasons that your timeline over the New Year was briefly colonised by endless lists of what is ‘in’ and what is ‘out’ for 2023, made by anonymous figures who suddenly imagined themselves custodians of the culture,
The battle over what is considered chic arguably reached fever pitch in 2022, to be fair. For the same reasons as you clutch onto doomed resolutions (again, it’s a wish for your life to have meaning and direction, I cannot emphasise this enough) we desperately tried to assign things the status of being ‘chic’ or ‘unchic’ as though it communicated something about ourselves, our own chicness, to be able to be arbiters of taste in this way. But then, when everything is chic, nothing is chic.
Anyway, whatever, we have compiled our own list. This is the only one that matters. Keep your list in the drafts, accept chaos, skip the gym, eat the Cathedral City mature cheddar, take the fags out of the bin, drink the cow milk, text them back. February soon come. We will get through this.
IN
– Resignation to fate
– Doing, like, one thing as your job
– Catholicism (still)
– Paragraph arguments
– Targeted advertising
– Keeping a diary
– Not drinking water
– Claudia Winkleman
– Smoking inside
– Dairy
– Lilt
– Retail parks
– Vanilla sex
– Lying for no reason
OUT
– Cultural analysis
– Nuance
– Elf bars
– Ethical non-monogamy
– Spending time with family (blood and/or chosen)
– Being annoyed by micro-trends
– Artisanal versions of normal foods (i.e. bread / coffee / chocolate)
– Restraint
– Calling your diary ‘journalling’
– Nepo baby discourse
– Substacks
– Having an excessive skincare routine
– Icks
– Movies longer than 90 minutes
– Ironic ‘x’ at the end of your messages