1. Negative Partisanship

Many people’s political views revolve not around what they support, but what they oppose. They’re always fighting against something rather than for something, and the constant focus on what they hate makes them nasty and miserable.

2. Enshittification

Online services start out serving users. When they have enough users, they switch to serving advertisers/shareholders, at the expense of users. For instance, Google Search initially showed you what you searched for, but now largely shows what it wants you to see.

3. Dawkins’ Law of the Conservation of Difficulty

The easier an academic field, the more it will try to preserve its difficulty by using complex jargon. Physicists use simple terms if possible, while postmodern theorists try to complexify their discipline by writing like this:

“The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.”

4. Reminiscence Bump

Americans of all ages tend to believe America peaked — morally, politically, economically, artistically — whenever they were a kid. Perhaps people who yearn for the time when their country was great are mostly just yearning for their childhood.

5. Region-Beta Paradox

Often we fail to improve our lives simply because things don’t get bad enough. If your new job is hell, you’ll leave it, but if it’s just unsatisfying, you’ll likely grind it out. Thus, small problems often threaten our quality of life more than big ones.

6. Dark-Ego-Vehicle Principle

Social justice activism is widely regarded as driven by noble intentions, but it attracts large numbers of psychopaths, narcissists, and other “dark tetrad” personalities who use it to feed their sense of self-importance and to dominate others. As Aldous Huxley wrote: “To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behaviour righteous indignation — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”

7. Protégé Effect

The best way to learn something is to try to teach it to others. The sense of responsibility to your student motivates you to understand a topic, and the act of explaining something helps you to connect the dots and commit them to memory.

8. Baumol’s Cost Disease

As an industry’s productivity increases, wages in that industry naturally rise. This forces wages — and prices — in services without increased productivity to also rise to stay competitive. Thus, as a country gets richer, goods become cheaper, but labour-intensive services like healthcare and college tuition cost more.

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9. Stockdale Paradox

The optimal state of mind is neither optimism (which leaves you unprepared for adversity) nor pessimism (which destroys motivation), but optimistic pessimism: by preparing for the worst outcomes, you increase confidence in dealing with any outcome, and thus, you increase hope.

10. Ozemponomics

GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic are threatening “limbic capitalism” by reducing cravings. For instance, the average household with at least one family member on a GLP-1 spends around 10% less on snacks. If this can reduce addictions and obesity, it will likely also reduce healthcare costs and unemployment.

11. Explanatory Inversion

Questions rest on unexamined assumptions, so always try flipping them. For instance, don’t just ask why there is poverty, ask why there is prosperity. This helps you realise poverty is the norm and the lack of it is the thing that needs to be explained.

12. Event Bias

One reason negativity dominates the news is that bad news tends to happen suddenly while good news tends to happen gradually so is rarely newsworthy on any particular day. But even though it may not get as much attention, good news is always happening.

13. Pie Fallacy

Many believe wealth is zero-sum; that if someone gets richer, someone else must get poorer. But wealth creation is one of society’s few positive-sum games; if you fix up a battered old car, you increase its value, making yourself richer without making anyone else poorer.

14. Golden Law of Stupidity

A stupid person is a person who causes losses to others while themselves deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.

15. Goal Dilution Effect

We assume that the more arguments we give, the better our case. In reality, our weakest arguments dilute the strongest. Generally, you’ll only be as convincing as your worst point, so instead of making as many arguments as you can, make only the best.

16. Bias Blindspot

We see bias easily in others, but not in ourselves. Whenever I post about a bias or fallacy, people tell me how it explains their opponents’ beliefs, but never their own. The assumption that bias is just something that affects those we disagree with is our greatest source of bias.

17. Sheepskin Effect

Employers value qualifications more than education. This is because the purpose of the education system is not actually to educate people, but to sort the “wheat” (worker bees) from the “chaff” (slackers, dreamers). What students learn is not as important as demonstrating that they can follow instructions and complete what they started, which a qualification signifies.

18. Deviancy Amplification

An outrageous act or event gets the public’s attention, prompting reporters to look for new examples. Cases that previously would not have been considered newsworthy are reported just because they fit the trend, creating the impression of an epidemic of such events. A recent example is mystery drone sightings.

19. Rumsfeld Matrix

There are things you know you know, things you don’t know you know, things you know you don’t know, and things you don’t know you don’t know. The last group is the biggest pitfall. Always try to account for what you don’t know you don’t know.

20. Left-Brain Interpreter

Experiments on split-brain patients show that when the experimenters instruct the patient’s right-side of the brain to perform an action (e.g. open the window), the patient will do it, and then the left-side of their brain, which was unaware of the instruction, will convince the patient they chose to do it unbidden (e.g. “because I felt hot”).Our reasons are stories we tell ourselves.

21. Blue Dot Effect

The more we solve our problems, the more we widen the definition of “problem” so that our number of problems remains constant. So don’t expect a life without problems. Progress doesn’t mean reducing your quantity of struggles, but increasing their quality. The goal of life is to trade bad problems for better ones.

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22. Overview Effect

Although astronauts are chosen for their unflappability, when they see the Earth from space — a tiny marble in an infinite void — they’re often overcome with a sense of profound connection with all humanity, and everyone’s earthly squabbles suddenly seem trivial. In the words of Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell: “on that fragile little sphere… all I had ever known, all I had ever loved and hated, longed for, all that I once thought had ever been and ever would be.” When something is bothering you, zoom out to see if it really matters.

23. Barrow’s First Law (aka Barrow’s Uncertainty Principle)

“Any universe simple enough to be understood is too simple to produce a mind able to understand it.” So don’t worry if you don’t know why you’re here, or where you’ll eventually go. Just focus on living. The purpose of life is to find purpose in life.

24. Ichi-go ichi-e

Every moment is unique and unrepeatable, so appreciate every experience as if it’s your last (which, in a way, it is). Even if your current situation sucks, be gracious that, of all the humans that will ever exist, only you will have the privilege of experiencing this moment in this specific way.

25. Sphexishness

Army ants follow each other’s pheromone trails to know where to go. Sometimes, they accidentally form a loop, or “ant mill”, circularly following each other until they die of exhaustion. Sphexishness is when you blindly follow a rule without checking if the rule works in the present situation. Don’t use the concepts in this list sphexishly. They’re not intended as rigid rules, only as food for thought.

This is an edited version of a list that first appeared on The Prism.

Veganuary-style health kicks and detoxes will succumb within days to the allure of that last half-jar of Stilton and the little gift bottle of Port that needs tidying up. The pledge to run every day will slowly convert itself into a general promise to be more active, and eventually the buzzing and the nudges from that fitness tracker you unwrapped on Christmas day get turned off, you lose the charger, and put it away.

Surely every house in the land has borne witness to countless diaries filled in religiously for a few weeks, half-heartedly for a few more (with a couple of days written at once to cover up a missed entry or four). Then one skipped day becomes five, and 50, and the diary quietly slips under the bedside table to be discovered in some burst of pre-Christmas cleaning, when — after the dust inspires a few sneezes — the blank pages inspire a few quiet seconds of bittersweet contemplation about our failure to live up to our aspirations to do better, be better.

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Honestly, I don’t know why we choose this time of year to make resolutions. We want to beat our instincts: use our rational brain to conquer whatever habits our emotions have drawn us into. We know that’s going to be hard: we’ll need to stretch every sinew to reinvent ourselves as that ur-version we have in our mind. And we decide to start the job in the cold, dark and wet, when our yearning for comfort and hunkering down is at its strongest. It’s as if we want to fail.

Yes, the allure of a new year is like the fresh beauty of a new notebook. And perhaps the indulgences of Christmas count as “rock bottom” to inspire habits of clean living. But come on: this is a rubbish time of year to be changing yourself.

At least most of us never take it as far as Benjamin Franklin, founding father not just of the United States of America, but of the school of self-improvement. In 1726, at the age of 20, he wrote a list of 13 virtues, from temperance to tranquillity, industry to justice. He tried to practice each virtue in turn to perfection, switching on to the next virtue once a week and putting a red mark in his diary every time he failed. The book, unsurprisingly, filled up with red marks, and while Franklin eventually stopped writing in it, he carried it with him until his death. It was a constant reminder of his imperfections.

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Most of us don’t carry around a literal book with which to brutalise our consciences. But whether it’s our failed resolutions, our failed diets, the books we didn’t read, the letters we didn’t write, the mothers we didn’t call, the businesses we didn’t start or the single-use plastics we didn’t shun: I think all but the most narcissistic of us carry some measure of guilt about the better person we could have been; the better use to which we could have put our time. A palpable sense of our own inadequacy seems to be part of the human condition. Why else would advertisers who urge us to enjoy the moment have come up with the slogan: Be More Dog? It seems the only way to truly let ourselves off the hook of self-improvement is to channel a different species.

That is, of course, what the research into mindfulness tells us about the best way to be happy. We have to be more dog. We have to let ourselves indulge in the experience of every moment, instead of letting our anxious minds plague us with thoughts of what comes next. There is something delightfully twisted about making a New Year’s Resolution to be more mindful. In a sense, mindfulness is the opposite of resolution-ing: it teaches us to accept rather than to aspire, to tolerate rather than transform.

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But I for one would be sad to see the end of resolutions. Dogs, after all, did not conquer the world, invent the wheel, the semi-conductor and antibiotics — and not just because they don’t have opposable thumbs. We did, because we never settle. Because we’re never quite content, and that’s what keeps us going – keeps us away from chasing sticks and rolling in mud all day just for the glory of it. And I value that bit of doubt, that little dose of self-loathing, the modicum of shame, that drives me to do better, be better, try harder. Our desire to transform ourselves is not just our greatest curse, it is our greatest blessing too.

We need to find a way to balance acceptance and aspiration. Of course, in the Christian faith that’s relatively easy because Jesus comes along, sees our inadequacy, loves us anyway, and does all the forgiveness on our behalf. No wonder it has such appeal for its billion followers.

But those of us who don’t happen to believe that Christ is the salvation of mankind need to work at forgiving ourselves. That’s a resolution that makes as little sense as a resolution to practice mindfulness. But it might be the best one available to us all.

There isn’t much point in making New Year’s Resolutions. But there isn’t much point in many of the things we do. So make some. Fail them in style. And find a way to love yourself just the way you are.