New year, new you? But why, when the old you is perfect as it is | Eva Wiseman

New year, new you? No thanks. I intend - and perhaps you will join me - to embrace the oldest self I can find. Improvements, upgrades, in a cost of living crisis? Are you kidding? In a time when it is difficult to keep warm and eat, we are expected to provide value? We're supposed to tone our bodies and sharpen our minds when the weather is horrible and the trains are off and the tap water tastes like violence? And god, honestly, who has the time, especially when the weather itself is unreliable, sometimes a viscous fluid that trickles slowly as the days go by, other times it turns into a roll of the dice, likely to tumble very quickly before getting stuck behind a couch. Change…it's not for me.

Instead, I'll try to dig into my guts, laziness and mud, the most horrible honesty and the darkest shames. I'm going to wallow in it for a while, in a bath of my own soups. Isn't that, in fact, what people want when they use anti-aging products? Where to invest in plastic surgery and fillers? Aren't they trying to meet again? To travel back in time and find their true selves, which they remember nine times out of 10 as looking like a 26-year-old trust fund manager with big naturals? Our real selves, our authentic selves, are hidden (we are encouraged to believe this) by our jowls or our ankles, or the soft waistband of flesh that rests on our jeans. It is compromised by the passage of time. To that I object.

Your authentic self, surely, is unphotogenic at best, and a bird trapped in a kitchen at worst, swinging terribly between murderous and needy . It's chaos, but a chaos in which you and only you know where everything is. Apart from the traumas, of course, which you have randomly and hastily filed away and which tend to spill out at the weirdest times, like when you sing Happy Birthday or hear the sound of scissors.

While the new you might start learning skills such as "posture" and "little talk", the old you can be found covered in a towel typing in the comment box from a fetal position. At parties, you're the one standing alone in the freezing garden pretending to vape to avoid the world's worst question: "So what did you do?" Where would you start? What have you done ? You worked that poppy seed out of your teeth. You've mastered the art of drinking coffee with a KitKat finger. You had fun at the table with candle wax for almost an entire hour. These answers never seem acceptable in the wild, but at home, in the bath of your own soup, it's blindingly clear that if people want better answers, they'll have to start asking better questions. We call it: liberation.

"Do one thing every day that scares you!" No, that sounds awful, and the exact opposite of the life I aspire to, which involves – and it's a top-notch thing – remaining almost exclusively unterrified from day to day. "Push your limits!" Limits exist for a reason, man. "To do work!" Have you ever heard of a labor shortage? "Get out of your comfort zone!" How about, instead, I go back and make a nice cozy den out of fleece and cookies? How about digging even deeper into that sweet old area and building an entire city there, complete with movie theaters, carpeting, and little bowls of chocolate buttons strewn across welcoming surfaces? How would that be? Would all my pains be transformed into graceful and important works of art? Unlikely. Would I win a marathon or sail the world on an eco-friendly dinghy made of milk bottles? Maybe not. Would I enjoy all nine seasons of The Office while chatting on WhatsApp in my pajamas? May be! And who's to say which is more rewarding?

After decades, when it becomes clear that every January demands a new you, we finally have to ask ourselves how much we have in us. A baby girl is born with around 1 million eggs, a baby boy is born with around 300 bones – the numbers drop rapidly over time, and so does yours. At some point, the effort to conceive, produce, and birth a new you becomes treacherous. You run the risk of destroying the original you, now simply a host of all the upgraded versions of shrimp emerging from its ruins every year with their abs and their therapeutic words. Quite. Enough of all this - enough self-help (let's help each other), enough self-improvement (finding the joys hidden under the rocks in our imperfect little existing lives), enough struggling to be better when the most of us are almost perfectly fine exactly as we are.

Would you like to join me for a nap? Or a gentle stroll down the mall or down the main street? Would you like to sit comfortably for a while here on the sofa and marvel at the TV, the comfort of our slippers and the way our body instinctively knows when to breathe in and out, a...