Ordinarily, I hate discussing New Year’s resolutions, given their high failure rate. New Year’s resolutions are like making midweek dinner plans with friends or catching a train in Sydney: easy to commit to in the moment but impossible to make a reality. I take no joy in this revelation, but it is simply a fact.
According to a recent study by the Baylor College of Medicine (my favourite college of medicine), 88 per cent of people who set New Year’s resolutions fail before the end of January. We’ve just crept over the halfway point of the month, so even if you’re still sticking to your “new year, new me” gym routine, chances are in the next two weeks, it’ll fall apart. Then you’ll just be the old you again, but with an overpriced and underused gym membership.
Over the holidays, I found myself in a “What are your hopes and dreams for 2025?” conversation at a party and rather than zoning out, I leant in. When my turn came, I stood triumphantly and announced: “This year, I will be making more enemies.”
There’s something to be said for dramatic declarations, and mine landed precisely as I’d hoped. Shock! Awe! Confusion! All except my wife, who had already heard about my many enemies’ plans and told me it was stupid, and I needed to grow up.
However, what she failed to appreciate was that self-growth was at the very core of my More Enemies in 2025 theory.
You see, the minute we learn to think, act and socialise independently, we’re conditioned to aggressively collect friends. I see it all the time with my kid at daycare: constant updates about his ability to make friends, how many friends he has, and what he does with friends.
Friendship is considered a crucial cog to becoming a well-rounded individual, all of which is true until you wake up as an adult with more than enough friends. It’s at this point that you must embrace the uncomfortable truth: friends make us happy, enemies make us better.
You may think I sound insane (possibly) or petty (definitely), but for once, I have science on my side. In 2014, a New York University (my favourite university) study of long-distance runners found that those who maintained a rival reported significantly higher motivation than those who did not, which resulted in considerably faster times: an improvement of nearly five seconds a kilometre.
As someone who thrives on competition but struggles with self-motivation, it’s been liberating to realise that the key to kick-starting my personal improvement was an imagined rivalry with someone who may or may not know I exist. Take, for example, my gym nemesis.
Our sole exchange involved me asking if he was still using the bench press, to which he sarcastically replied the weight looked a little heavy for me. Within an instant, he became a sworn enemy, someone for whom I only wished the worst. Over the next few months, I obsessively watched how much weight he was lifting until I was eventually able to catch up and then overtake him.
In addition to the guy from the gym, I have three other current nemeses in rotation. One is an annoying ex-colleague who insists on posting “Some Personal News” updates on LinkedIn even when she has nothing important to say (good for career motivation), and another is a dad at the local park who once yelled at my child unnecessarily (handy as a reminder not to be an awful parent).
But my MVE (Most Valuable Enemy) is a former schoolmate I haven’t seen since I was 10. I went to an incredibly Anglo primary school, and this guy made fun of me for being Greek (joke’s on him; we’re the cradle of civilisation.
These days, he is a successful builder with a semi-famous influencer wife, several houses and a jet-ski. Even though he may be a lovely guy now, it’s comforting to cast him as an awful person with lots of nice stuff, if only to remind myself that I’d still rather be me than him.
You’ll be pleased to know that with the end of January just around the corner, auditions for new enemies are already well under way. It’s currently a horse race between a neighbour who criticised my parking and a waiter who corrected my pronunciation of bruschetta – either way, 2025 is shaping up to be the best year
