Blood Pressure Blog

The date of December 31^st is the most forsaken date in the history of mankind – with dreams and resolutions of the previous calendar year ending up dead as some look to new goals for the next 365 days. To be honest, nobody really cares about your new year’s resolutions. According to a surely unbiased study, resolutions have a 7% pass rate – something that’s lower than randomly picking a gay person in the American population or experiencing rain in Los Angeles. Though we as a humanity have been graded on this extreme curve believing that 7% is a passing grade, I too have fallen into this trap that making new year’s resolutions is something solely done for clout chasing. People are quick to judge when others say – ‘My new year’s resolution is to exercise’ or ‘my new year’s resolution is to further my hobby’ – chasing the pie in the sky without leaving the ground. Frankly, people should just set super easy new year’s resolutions like drinking one glass of milk or washing their car – clearing the way for 364 days of unbridled chaos after day 1. For example, I started to do ‘dry January sometimes on all days excluding Fridays and Saturdays’ and that goal went south literally on 12:01 AM on January 1^st. Thus, the axe above my head of a clearly unachievable goal is now gone and I can truly look forward to 2022.

As I mentioned, I too have fallen into this trap – setting myself this extremely arbitrary goal of ‘being a good person’ without a checks and balances system that tracks this fake persona that I’m trying to build. One day I said to myself ‘maybe I should maybe not be a complete idiot to other people’. The double ‘maybe’ is slightly concerning, but I don’t know if the English police will catch me in this no-man’s land between a double positive and a double negative. Regardless, a person a long time ago told me to ‘always be myself’. Now I realize that they were being mean.

What does it mean to be a good person? Before we ask existential questions – what do good people do? The obvious answer is treating others like yourself, doing charity, focusing internally, not making jokes about people, staying off Hinge – is a good baseline list to establish. Unfortunately, we now live in 2022, hedonism is at an all-time high, meaning everything that can be made fun of…will be made fun of. For example, is it horrible to have the opinion that 90% of people that do charity/public service are high school students looking for college admissions fodder, or corporate-funded groups looking for some quick public relations 101 while simultaneously stealing their own worker’s rights? Even internally-focused attempts at being a good person are foiled, because it’s impossible to know that status of being a good person without looking like a dickhead and asking your peers – ‘am I a good person’ like an approval-seeking robot. Kristen Bell on The Good Place would simply tell you to call God.

Frankly I know that it takes exactly $0 to be a good person. I know that money talks, and my money is most known for saying goodbye. This fact likely explains why rate of charity and public service are greater amongst lower-middle income families. Unfortunately, achieving innate goodness to being a better person while performing a sense of fake civil duty to raise the 7% cannot simply be achieved in one year.