(Greensboro, NC) Grady Connors rang in 2020, telling all of his friends how excited he was for the coming year.
"We're going to get Trump out of the White House," he said, with a smile, just after taking a very large sip of his fourth New Year's Eve martini, "And, that's just one thing."
Conners' incautious optimism spread quickly to his friends.
"I'm really looking forward to the decade when we get socialized medicine, and they start funding the schools more," commented Tessa Woodbridge, who was on her third cosmopolitan of the night.
"I don't know about you guys," said Joshua Connors, Grady's older brother, "But, I plan on working out more and getting out of this freaking job. It's a total soul stealer."
The elder Connors, who works as retail manager at the local mall, has made this resolution alternatively to himself and to others, since 2008. Many of his peers find themselves in similar situations. According to research from Hundgren University, the likelihood of a resolution's success for a New Year is most directly correlated with whether or not the resolver has made the same one in previous years.
"What you've got," says Dr. Archibald Tanner, the head of the project, "is a bunch of people who can't register how overly optimistic their promises to themselves are because they're drunk. Are you going to lose weight this year? Well, did you promise yourself that you'd do that last year? You did? Well, did you then proceed to actually lose the weight? No? Hmmm... There's a probably specious Einstein quote that nevertheless works quite well here: the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. This isn't brain surgery. I cannot believe that someone felt the need to call for papers on this. I needed something for my grad students to do so that they'd leave me along to conduct real research on something that isn't so blatantly obvious that we communicate it with a truism."
Grady Connors and friends woke up, suffering hangovers the next day, many of them unaware of the absurdly optimistic prognostications that they had made for themselves and the world at large. 40% of party guests realized that they had actually made claims with regard to "not waking up hungover tomorrow" and "not getting drunk tonight." 60% of guests actually made these claims.
With the very first resolution broken mere hours into the new year, Grady Connors and his friends were quick to abandon plans to work out, go vegan, save money, abstain from alcohol, and curtail their reliance on social media. This was done in celebratory fashion at an expensive brunch, where no fewer than four of the party-goers posted pictures of themselves continuing on the downward spiral into alcoholism, poverty, and self-delusion.
No comments:
Post a Comment