White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

New Year’s Resolutions Are Bad — Slough Off Instead

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A remarkable autobiography by Anthony Inglis, the English conductor and musicologist, is titled, “Sit Down, Stop Waving Your Arms About!” Quite so.

This admonition occurred while Inglis was conducting a musical. Someone sitting in the front row tapped him on the shoulder and told him to sit down and stop waving his arms about.

My admonition to you for the new year is to sit down and stop stressing yourself.

We are plagued with the idea of stress, and yet we start the new year with resolutions. We order a raft of these stress-making endeavors.

Want a stress-free new year? Stop your New Year’s resolutions right now.

Do you need to tell yourself that you will stay on your diet? No. You won’t anyway.

Do you need to set a goal of going to the gym five times a week? No. You won’t get to Planet Fitness more than once or twice, in the whole year.

So, your desk looks like a dump, leave it alone. You will promise yourself that for the first time ever you will get organized in 2026. You won’t. So why get stressed about it?

You have promised yourself that this year you are going to improve your mind and read 20 great books. You won’t. Best case, you will flip through a James Patterson thriller or a Danielle Steel romance. Maybe the detective novel you purchased at an airport will make it to your nightstand, alongside the classic you plan to read when you get around to it. That is never, so get rid of that reproving volume. Give it to charity. You will shed stress and feel good at the same time by doing that.

Sloth clothed as virtue is so, so stress-relieving.

Put aside the stress of resolutions in the new year and relax into a year of self-indulgence.

If a work colleague comes over to you and starts talking about productivity, cross your arms, sit down and, if your system allows, break wind.

Approach work as a card-carrying slough-off. In the Soviet Union, which was supposed to be the “workers’ paradise,” workers used to say, “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.” Good on them.

If striving is pointless, stop striving. Give it a rest.

I suggest there is a terrible national lack of malaise. At every turn, we are urged to learn more, work harder and innovate, innovate, innovate. You don’t need innovation to have a second helping, open a beer or take the day off.

You may need to be a little innovative, explaining why you aren’t at work. But that isn’t so hard: Claim a mental health day. Particularly if you are well and fit enough to enjoy it at the beach, at a movie theater or snuggled down into your bed.

If people are telling you to “lean in” and “try harder or the Chinese will get ahead,” go to dinner at a Chinese restaurant and wonder at the number of dishes which can be prepared almost instantly — none of which you would cook. Then conclude that the Chinese have already won and stop stressing.

Think back to when we stressed mightily about the Japanese and the Germans beating us at everything. Then enjoy a suffusing, warm gladness when you realize that all that leaning in and trying harder hasn’t helped them beat us. Maybe we should have a national academy for failing upward.

Lloyd Kelly, a fine artist and a friend, teaches Tai Chi in Louisville, Kentucky, particularly in one of the city’s hospitals. He advises his students — some of whom are in wheelchairs — to stay within their comfort level, “to give just 70%.”

There is something beautiful about that admonishment at a time when people are stressed out and society is mindlessly urging you to struggle, to achieve, to conquer.

Here, then, is a resolution you can keep: I am only going to give a 70% effort. That way, perchance, you will have a great new year by default.

It Isn’t the Stress That Gets To Air Traffic Controllers

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If you don’t know about the stress air traffic controllers are reportedly under, then maybe you are an air traffic controller.

The fact is that air traffic controllers love what they do — love it and wouldn’t do anything else.

The stress comes with long hours, Federal Aviation Administration bureaucracy and a general lack of recognition, not with moving airplanes safely about the sky.

Of course, I haven’t interviewed every controller, but I have talked to a lot of them over the years and have been in many control towers.

Controllers love the essentiality of it. They love aviation in all its forms.

They love the man-and-machine interface, which is at the heart of modern aviation. They love the sense of being part of a great system — the power, the language, the satisfaction.

They love the trust that every pilot puts in them. It is rewarding to be trusted in anything, but more so when the price of failure is known.

Nearly everything that is true of pilots is true of controllers. At its heart, the job is about flight, arguably the greatest achievement of mankind, the fulfillment of millennia of yearning.

There is a saying often attributed to Winston Churchill that was actually said by a pilot and insurance executive in the 1930s: “Aviation in itself is not inherently dangerous. But to an even greater degree than the sea, it is terribly unforgiving of any carelessness, incapacity or neglect.”

That is true both of pilots and those at the consoles on the ground, who co-fly with them.

After President Ronald Reagan fired more than 11,000 striking controllers in 1981, some of the saddest people I knew were air traffic controllers.

They were denied the right to do the work they loved and suffered immeasurably for that. A few were able to get work overseas, but mostly it was a light that went out and stayed out.

I ran into one former controller, working as a baggage handler. He said he just wanted to be near the action even if he couldn’t go into the tower anymore and do his dream job.

My only major criticism of Reagan has always been that he didn’t rehire the strikers after he had won, proving that they were wrong in striking illegally and that they weren’t above the law.

Reagan was a compassionate man, but he showed the controllers no compassion. I think if he had understood the psychological pain he had inflicted, he would have relented.

Controllers have explained to me that if a controller finds the job stressful, then he or she shouldn’t be a controller.

About one-third of the candidates for controllers’ school, most of whom are trained at the FAA Academy in Oklahoma City flunk out.

It takes longer to train a controller than a pilot — maybe not to work in the cockpit of a passenger jet, but certainly to fly an aircraft, including jets. It takes at least four years of schooling, simulator and then supervised controlling to qualify to be an FAA controller. Some controllers come from the military.

There is just one movie about air traffic control, released in 1999, “Pushing Tin.” It flopped at the box office but has a cult following among pilots and controllers. It is funny and accurate. Pushing tin is controllers’ jargon for what they do: push airplanes around the sky.

The fabled stress, in my mind, is the adrenaline factor. It is present in air traffic control, and it is present in the cockpit of everything that leaves the ground, from single-engine Cessnas to Boeing 777s — and in ATC facilities.

It interests me that pilots never mention stress. It is, however, always mentioned by people writing about or talking about air traffic control. I would venture that the most stress controllers deal with is the stress imposed on them by the FAA.

I will aver that in the government shutdown, the largest source of stress for controllers was how they were going to put food on the table and pay their bills, not the stress they feel at the console, pushing tin and keeping flying safe. Now they are stressed about back pay.