‘I’ll start on Monday’ and the power of fresh startism | Jack Marshall’s column

The intoxicating illusion of a new start is the kind of dopamine mine that we will frankly never tire of drilling as a species. We’re hard-wired to drift into the comfort of ‘I’ll start on Monday’ and of performatively superficial quick fixes - a crisp new notebook to organise your whole life in or an impossibly strict new diet to carve abs out of a soft belly.

It’s the irresistible temptation of a red line marking the trench between the old you with flaws and unresolved issues, and the new model, all 6am runs and iron-fisted control. There is no transition because transition is messy and hard. Transition is gradual, it’s not a new notebook which acts as totemic evidence for immediate change. It’s intangible.

It’s why ‘new year, new me’ is a thing and why an errant couple of biscuits on a Wednesday can lead to a takeaway on Thursday, a fry-up on Saturday, and promises to start again on Monday. Fresh starts are so seductive because they’re a mental commitment to changes we want, just not a commitment to the effort now: easily written-off accountability debt.

The minor acts of indulgence and self-sabotage once the week you’d earmarked as destined to be perfect are some of life’s great acts of pleasure and pain. Despite Sunday plans, Monday piety, and Tuesday steadfastness, a Wednesday blip becomes a Thursday wobble, an often-epic Friday surrender, Saturday pledges, and more strict Sunday plans.

It’s all-or-nothing, an impossible merry-go-round of destructive perfectionism and self-brainwashing. Real change doesn’t happen on a Monday as scheduled, it just happens as a result of slow, murky effort. As a result of turning up, of accepting lapses as inevitable and moving on with forgiveness in mind because you’re human. Not now-or-never.

It’s horrible, but the person you picture when you make Sunday plans to be executed with military-grade precision and discipline come Monday morning doesn’t and never will exist. They’re too idealistic a creation. But there is a happier version ready to be lived rather than written on fresh stationery.