Costica Bradatan in Time:
Our conveniently vague or unrealistic New Year Resolutions fail because they are meant to fail. Because they are made half in jest, in an unguarded moment of carnivalesque freedom. For most of us, this may be the only time of the year when can afford to mock failure, even as we mock ourselves in the process. The only time where we can take back control of our failings—or at least, feel like we do. Most of the time, it is failure that controls and mocks us, and we can’t even attempt a smile as it does so.
For failure is no laughing matter. In Western culture, and especially in the U.S., we tend to associate failure with the most serious of calamities: loss of social status and respectability, public degradation, marginalization, ostracization. Since failure doesn’t like to travel alone, whenever it shows up, a sense of finality and doom also creeps in.
There is a good historical reason for that.
More here.