The most interesting thing about resolutions is not that we make them, but the various ways we find to break them. We have entered the month where New Year's resolutions are laid to rest. My resolve is usually no match for this bleak stretch of midwinter. I suspect it is only matter of time until I resign myself to frozen inactivity. I will come to see the strange paradox of making promises to myself: I am not the same man I was at New Years, the man who promised to jog regardless of snowstorms or to forego my daily beer regardless of the craving. Philosophers have a name for this sort of situation: akrasia, or weakness of will in which one acts against his or her better judgment.

Akrasia is usually described as a type of “losing control,” and in some cases, I guess this is right.  Breaking a promise can be so sudden, so dramatic, it appears one has really lost his or her mind in the process. Losing control, however, is often more measured and self-conscious. I can see the transgression of my will coming from a long way off: I can anticipate the arrival of akrasia and how I will greet it at the doorway of a choice that I know I will have to make. In this case, it's very hard to say that I lose my head. If I’m honest, I know exactly what I am doing, or rather I can predict with a high degree of probability what I will do at a particularly decisive point in the future. The philosopher J.L. Austen describes the slow, calculated demise of one’s resolve.