The idea of a pristine fresh start is enticing. Whose life is so perfect they don’t think they’d make a better job of it the second time around? How To Disappear Completely And Never Be Found, published in 1997, contains instructions for committing what its author Doug Richmond calls “pseudocide”: faking your own death and starting again, unencumbered by the disappointments of the past.
The awkward truth, though, is that a similar, if less extreme, addiction to “fresh starts” underlies much of what we do. Self-improvement undertakings rest on the unspoken assumption that, by sheer force of will, we can cut ourselves free from unwanted personality traits once and for all. But fresh-startism seeps throughout private and public life. It’s the promise of most politicians campaigning for election, and of managers unveiling strategic plans to overhaul ailing companies.
The concept of the fresh start suggests a very bizarre notion of the self. It implies that you can “stand back” from your personality characteristics, nominate some of them for change, then set to work. But, obviously, we are those characteristics; they define us. The self doing the work is the self being acted upon. This needn’t mean change is impossible – clearly, it isn’t – but it makes things vastly more complicated. It means we’re inescapably implicated in what we’re trying to leave behind, and it makes the idea of a fresh start highly suspect. Start Where You Are is the title of three different books on happiness, but the real point isn’t that you ought to start where you are; it’s that you have no option: you are where you are.
To put it less delicately, you suck, and you're probably going to continue to suck. Deal with it.
However, I think there is an important difference between sucking at certain traits (e.g., social astuteness) and sucking at certain routines (e.g., eating Bojangles after your workout) and sucking at certain skills (e.g., drawing ponies).
With skills, with any effort, you can't help but to improve.
Routines, by definition, are less easy (and sometimes very hard) to change, because that's what makes them routines.
And with undesirable traits, well, you're probably better off learning to stop considering them undesirable, because you suck, and you are probably going to continue to suck.
(I'm not sure the skills / routines / traits distinction is the best one, but it seems clear that some kind of distinction is necessary.)
