January: The Month of Forgiven Failures

Everyone talks about January as fresh starts, but the statistics reveal it's actually a forgiveness mechanism disguised as an aspiration engine.

January 1st, and I'm walking to the food court. My family is down with the predictable holiday cold, and I need soup. To get there, I have to pass the gym - positioned, I've always suspected, deliberately between entrance and sustenance.

Today it's packed. Not July, or September packed. January packed, which is its own phenomenon. That performative quality to the bodies on the treadmills. The woman on the elliptical, the man adjusting weights; they’re moving with tentativeness, uncertainty about whether they belong here. But they came anyway.

I’m waiting for my soup when the thought crosses my mind: They're here for permission. Permission to believe that December 31st was an ending and January 1st a beginning. Permission to seal the past away and file it under a concluded date. On my walk back home, I watch them and feel it too. The calendar has turned, and something has been forgiven.

At home, I slurp on my soup slowly. My son is on the couch with a book about trains. Our apartment has that January 1st quiet. I think about the gym, still packed at this hour, and wonder how many of those bodies will still be there in March.

I can't let the question sit unanswered - a hazard of being someone who falls down research rabbit holes the way other people scroll social media. By the time I've finished my soup, I've pulled up half a dozen studies on my phone. The answer, statistically, is very few. In a 2014 study published in Management Science, behavioural scientist Katherine Milkman and her colleagues at the Wharton School identified what they call the Fresh Start Effect: temporal landmarks (New Year's Day, Mondays, birthdays) create psychological distance from past failures.

"Those failures are the old you, and this is the new you," Milkman explained in a subsequent interview. "When we can wipe out all those failures and look at a clean slate, it makes us feel more capable.”

But notice the language: wiping out the failures. The motivation comes not from excitement about the future but relief about the past. Milkman's research tracked gym visits, Google searches for "diet," and commitment contracts across multiple studies. All spiked at temporal boundaries. People were more likely to exercise at the start of a week or semester. But here's what the data actually shows: the landmarks don't generate transformation, but just generate opportunities to try again after failing. The mechanism is absolution dressed up as aspiration.

The Accounting Trick

What's interesting is how we've borrowed the architecture of forgiveness and applied it to self-improvement. Economist Richard Thaler won a Nobel Prize partly for identifying what he called "mental accounting" - the way people create separate psychological ledgers for money, treating it differently based on its source or intended use rather than its actual value.

January functions as a new accounting period. December 31st, you're a person who didn't exercise, didn't write the novel, didn't learn Mandarin. January 1st, you're... the same person. But we act as if the temporal boundary changes the fact. It doesn't - but it changes the accounting. Last year's failures get filed in a closed ledger. This year's attempts belong to a fresh account. The debt doesn't transfer. We start at zero.

Ancient Permission: January didn't invent the mechanism... it secularised one.

The Roman god Janus, for whom the month is named, had two faces: one looking to the past, one to the future. Romans marked January 1st by exchanging gifts and making offerings at thresholds. The day acknowledged what humans have always known: crossing from one state to another requires permission.

Most major traditions formalise this return. Yom Kippur's communal confession: "We have trespassed, we have betrayed, we have stolen." The Japanese practice of ōsōji - the great cleaning before New Year, sweeping away the old year's dust. Catholic absolution: "I absolve you of your sins."

January is our secular version. We kept the ritual but dropped the theology. We expose last year's failures in resolution lists and year-end reflections, then file them away. We still need the permission structure. We just stopped calling it absolution.

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January 2nd. We're feeling better - the cold has loosened its grip. My son returns to school. Before work, I take a short walk around the neighbourhood. At 7:30 a.m., the gym is packed. For now.

Research by Per Carlbring at Stockholm University found that even with optimal framing - phrasing goals as approach ("I will eat fruit daily") versus avoidance ("I will stop eating sweets") - the failure rate remains staggering. Which raises the question: if the system produces 80-90 percent failure, why does it persist?

Because perhaps it's succeeding at something we don't want to name out loud. The Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warns against "the single story" - how narratives become stereotypes by being incomplete rather than untrue. The transformation narrative of January isn't untrue; some people do change. But it misses what the ritual actually does for most: provides permission to try, fail, and try again without drowning in accumulated guilt.

Later, a WhatsApp message: "Did you know January wasn't always the first month? Romans started the year in March." It's from the kind of friend who sends me trivia unprompted. We recognise each other, we hoarders of useless facts.

March, when the Roman year aligned with the agricultural cycle. January is artificial, arbitrary - a human invention imposed on continuous time. Which makes it perfect. We need the artifice, the clean break that doesn't actually break anything. American writer James Baldwin observed that "nothing can be changed until it is faced." January lets us face our failures without requiring change. What's dishonest is pretending the ritual is about achievement when it's about absolution.

On my walk home, I pass the gym again. The woman from yesterday is back on the elliptical. Or perhaps it's a different woman. At this distance, it's hard to tell. What matters is that she's there. Rituals work by giving us permission to remain ourselves while believing we might change.

At home, I commence work. Fresh notebook, clean page, to-do list typed in Notion, inbox sorted into folders I've convinced myself I'll maintain this time. It feels possible again. I'm forgiving myself for every organisational system I've abandoned. For the gap between the person I imagine I'll become and the person I continue to be.

The British-Indian essayist Pico Iyer writes, "We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves." We make resolutions to lose our past selves, and when we find ourselves unchanged, we're granted permission to try again. The destination was never transformation. It was always forgiveness.

Through the window, the gym is full. By next month it will be half-empty. By March, back to normal. And next December 31st, someone - maybe the same woman on the elliptical, maybe someone new - will write down a resolution. January 1st will arrive. I'll open another fresh notebook.

The calendar will turn. And something - not everything, but something - will be forgiven.