The beginning of the year has become the temporal landmark for setting out new goals and making promises of transcending our old faulty selves. But this practice is accompanied by the all-too-familiar disappointment of broken new year's resolutions. Rebecca Roache warns about the oppressive perfectionist ideology animating this ritual, offering an alternative, kinder approach to self-improvement.

On 1st January 1863, Mark Twain wrote, ‘Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual’. Presumably, like the rest of us, Twain signed up for a cheap new year gym membership deal and then never went back after mid-January.