for a New Year’s edition of The Guardian, journalist Rebecca Seal was given an assignment. It was set to be part of a special issue cheekily titled ‘New Year, Same You’, and the gist was that New Year’s resolutions were bogus; instead, you should just accept the worst bits of yourself. Rebecca spoke to academics, philosophers, behaviour-change experts and scientists, all on the same topic: why we battle so earnestly against all the normal parts of being an ‘angry, sad, messy, tired, sad, soft and round’ human – and how to reject the societal message that just being normal was somehow wrong.
‘What if we don’t have to be all the things we’ve been told we ought to be – and could just be our lovely, flawed, soft-bellied selves? What…
