Mr. Irresponsible's Bad Advice

...And a Very Irresponsible New Year

Mr. Irresponsible doesn’t believe in New Year’s resolutions. A New Year’s resolution is a dream of self-betterment, fed by the sugary bedtime snack of a wrongheaded belief in human perfectability. (Mr. Irresponsible also doesn’t believe in human perfectability. Gosh, there are so many things Mr. Irresponsible doesn’t believe in!) And yet, people continue year after year to scrawl their New Year’s wish lists, as if they were in the grip of some mass delusion. Which, of course, they are. It is the delusion that this year, of all years, we will live by the lights of what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. This year of all years we will eat less, read more, be kind to others. This year, this year.

The problem is, the well-meaning but scrawny better angels of our nature were long ago whomped into submission by the true angels of our nature -- huge, snappish, ill-tempered creatures who look something like the guy on “American Chopper.” Would you want to go up against the guy on “American Chopper”? Not me, and neither would the better angels of our nature. They checked out years ago. So what’s really fueling the annual ritual of the New Year’s resolution? Some atavistic impulse toward self-improvement, which in any sane world would have been filed away eons ago with other atavistic impulses, like the one that drove our monkey forebears to pick small insects out of our relatives’ coats and eat them.

I don’t really imagine that one advice columnist can break an entire nation of its addiction to a ritual this powerful. The best I can do is offer some tips for formulating your own New Year’s resolutions if you absolutely insist on making them, which, let’s face it, you do. My hope is that these tips will at least help you make more effective use of your resolution-making time by shattering unrealistic goals and lowering expectations. That’s my New Year’s gift to you -- the precious gift of lowered expectations. Take it and be reasonably well and sort of happy in 2006.

MR. IRRESPONSIBLE’S GUIDE TO NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS, IF YOU ABSOLUTELY INSIST ON MAKING THEM

1. Make them vaguely useful. The world does not need more French speakers. The world needs more neurosurgeons.

2. Keep them short. A New Year’s resolution which is so verbose it needs to be written down and carried around in your wallet has absolutely no chance of being kept. Here’s a handy rule of thumb: If your resolution is so long it needs to be spell-checked, it’s useless.

3. Don’t aim those things at me. Any resolution whose goal is altering the behavior of another person is doomed to failure. There is a simple reason for this: All attempts to alter the behavior of other people, whether formulated in early January or mid-summer, are doomed to failure. I’ll change when I’m good and ready, thank you. Go change yourself if you love changing things so much. You can start with that striped sweater. You know the one.

4. Keep them to yourself. If there’s ever been anything more deadly than a roomful of people boring each other stiff with their New Year’s resolutions, it would have to have been the Influenza Epidemic of 1918.

5. Have fun with them.  Be creative. As long as you’re setting yourself an impossible task, why not embrace the very impossibility of it? Forget about resolving to quit smoking. A chimp can quit smoking. Instead, resolve to master time travel. That’ll give ‘em something to talk about at your next SmokEnders meeting. (Ed. Note: This is apparently the way the program actually spells its name. My resolution is to procure them the extra “e” they apparently were too jittery to include.)

Good luck, and semi-happy New Year. (Remember: lowered expectations.) And remember too  that if the burden of self-improvement proves too crushing -- and it will -- there is always someone who loves you just as you are.

Oh heavens, I just read that and saw what it looked like. It's not me. I just figure there has to be someone who loves you just as you are. I mean, it's The Law of Large Numbers, right? Then again, I was always pretty bad at math. 

Have Yourself an Irresponsible Little Post-Christmas

I've remarked elsewhere on the gauzy, energy-sapping air of unreality that prevails during the extended holiday period. This year-ending torpor, which reaches its peak in the week between Christmas and New Year's, falls particularly hard on office workers, who have to maintain at least the appearance of best business practices during a period when they'd really rather just down the last of the Snowman-shaped chocolates and stumble off to bed. So for new readers dropping in via the Fast Company weblog, a few tips on how to make the best of this sleepy off-week in the office.

1) This is an excellent week to steal office supplies. Efficient office managers, unwilling to lose any budget dollars left unspent in the last few weeks of the year, will have laid in a princely stock of legal pads, pens and those nice rubbery desk blotters. Now go nuts! Fill a pillowcase like St. Nick himself with Swingline staplers and multicolored Post-Its. Don't worry about getting them out past the drowsy security guard, who hates your employer even more than you do. In fact, brighten his day with a broad, larcenous wink as you roll the boss's personal copier out to your car. He'll appreciate the personal greeting, which is more than the boss himself ever gave him.

2) If your company was kind enough to give you a Christmas gift, use the corporate T1 connection to list it for sale on eBay. The lightning-quick upload of your descriptive text will enable you to beat the rush, and is sure to help you secure top dollar for your faux-crystal desk clock or motivational paperweight. (And remember: It is not actually your attitude that determines your altitude. It is much more accurate to say, as my friends at Despair.com do, that "Hard work often pays off after time, but laziness always pays off now.")

3) Finally, take advantage of the relative quiet and isolation to gather dirt on your co-workers. In a nice coincidence, the ones you will most likely want to incriminate -- i.e., those higher up the ladder -- are also the ones who are most likely to be spending the week elsewhere. So look at this week as a chance to redress some of the cruel inequities of office life, like the one that traps you in an airless maze of cubicles while your boss takes his idiot son snowboarding in Vail. Thus emboldened, dig deep. Waste baskets and recycling bins are a rich, loamy source of incriminating data. And when your boss drifts back in sometime after the 3rd and demands to know why he's been summoned to Corporate for a dressing-down, and what the hell happened to his copier, anyway, just smile. And enjoy your Happy New Year, courtesy of Mr. Irresponsible.

Big Crazy

Today's manners lesson comes to us from very far to the east, or maybe it's the west. Mr. Irresponsible was never big on geography. The point is, it's very far. And a good thing too, because these guys make our homegrown nutbars look like Sunday at the Jaycees. Yes, it's the democratically-elected government of the Islamic Republic of Iran! Specifically, the sixth president of same, former Tehran mayor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who told an audience in the Iranian city of Zahedan on December 14 that the Holocaust is a myth perpetrated by European Jews to justify the creation of Israel. The lesson: When you're gonna go crazy, go BIG crazy. There's no point in delicate, performance-art-like little cameos of eccentricity, not if you're going to draw the really big press. No, for that you need to hang it all out there, as I think we can agree Mr. Ahmadinejad has done. Want proof?  Even the Germans are outraged. This seems a conclusive indication that history may not have a sense of humor, but it sure does get a kick out of irony.  So the next time you're considering an act of public looniness, remember that its impact is sure to be lessened if you take anything off the pitch. Lean back and smoke that baby.

The Role of The Hissy Fit in Geopolitics, And How To Make It Work For You

Just back from an extended round of strategy meetings with my attorneys. They were fairly productive, and I think I can say this with a high degree of confidence: If you have ever crossed me, and you have any plans to do anything requiring extensive use of two functioning knees, I'd suggest you pencil 'em in before mid-January. And beyond that my lawyers have urged me not to go.

And that's really the trouble with lawyers, isn't it? -- the instinct toward weaselly, word-parsing self-protection. It's the kind of instinct that says, for example, that if you've come up with a beautiful plan for revenge against your many enemies, a plan involving split-second timing, a truckload of ball bearings and the services of a highly-trained cadre of ex-military paralegals, why, you should hide that beautiful, vengeful light under a basket. Mr. Irresponsible just can't see the wisdom in this. Which is why the news on this morning's wires was so bracing. It described a client brave and resourceful enough to defy his own lawyers' advice, and demonstrated that with enough conviction one can throw a highly-public hissy fit and get away clean. I'm talking, of course, about defendant Saddam Hussein, whose screechy histrionics about his jailers' "terroristic" tactics were only the beginning. (These apparently involved denying him access to a Rainfall Showerhead and the Tighty Whities he so famously favors.) At the end of yesterday's session in Baghdad the deposed president told the court to "go to hell" and swore he wouldn't return until the new central government returned the CDs it had borrowed and wiped his number from its mobile phones "like, forever." (I may be a little sketchy on the details here.) Showing an iron will and a refusal to be cowed, the judge gaveled the trial back into session for about twenty minutes this morning before shutting the whole thing down for a two-week break. The lesson seems obvious: Bad behavior works.

Keep in mind, however, that there is a question of scale. If you become hysterical when your boss asks you to stop bringing your xBox to work and playing Dance Dance Revolution during staff meetings, and you stomp from the room swearing never to return, you will likely be fired. If you can arrange to get your tantrum covered on CNN International, though, you will immediately become a figure of stature. (Your co-workers will probably continue to refer to you under their breaths as a jackass, but what did those hacks and grumblers ever do for you?) So remember: When life hands you lemons, stomp them into lemonade!