Every January starts the same way.
Gym memberships spike. Grocery carts fill with vegetables people don’t recognize. Phones buzz with reminders to become better, calmer, healthier versions of ourselves. And by February, most of it quietly fades.
That cycle isn’t new. It’s ancient.
The idea of making promises at the start of the year goes back more than 4,000 years to ancient Babylon, where people made vows to their gods during a New Year festival called Akitu. These weren’t lofty self-improvement goals. They were practical. Return borrowed tools. Pay debts. Settle scores. Fail, and the gods were believed to respond accordingly.
The Romans later named January after Janus, the two-faced god of transitions, looking both backward and forward. Medieval knights took the idea even further, publicly swearing vows of honor with their hands placed on a roasted peacock, a bird believed at the time to symbolize immortality. The ritual wasn’t subtle. It was meant to be witnessed, remembered, and enforced by shame.
Modern resolutions, by comparison, are private and quiet. They live in notes apps and forgotten planners. There’s no peacock. No audience. No real consequence beyond personal disappointment.
That gap between intention and follow-through is part of what sparked the latest episode of the Whiskey@Work podcast, which takes a deliberately sideways approach to the New Year. Instead of focusing on “good” resolutions, the episode leans into the idea of bad ones, and why humans seem wired to repeat them anyway.
The conversation is anchored by a whiskey called Darts, a bottle that feels intentionally unaspirational. It doesn’t promise reinvention or purity. It feels more like a barstool than a podium. The name alone suggests a certain honesty about bad ideas and familiar habits.
From there, the episode wanders into one of history’s stranger throughlines: smoking.
Long before cigarettes became a habit, tobacco held ceremonial meaning among Indigenous cultures in the Americas. Smoke was used intentionally, often spiritually, as a form of communication rather than compulsion. That changed quickly once tobacco reached Europe.
One of the earliest recorded European smokers, Rodrigo de Jerez, was reportedly arrested in 16th-century Spain because neighbors believed his ability to exhale smoke meant he was possessed. Smoking later became medicine, prescribed for headaches and stomach ailments, and even used in the form of smoke enemas to revive drowning victims. None of this was malicious. It was ignorance paired with confidence, a recurring human combination.
By the late 1800s, industrial cigarette production made smoking cheap, portable, and consistent. Hollywood later transformed it into shorthand for rebellion, confidence, and identity. Even when medical evidence mounted, behavior lagged behind knowledge.
That lag is the connective tissue of the episode. Humans don’t stop doing things simply because they learn better. They stop when habits lose their meaning, their convenience, or their cultural appeal.
Darts, with its tobacco-adjacent notes and layered history, becomes a metaphor rather than a message. The episode is careful to draw a line between memory and repetition, between understanding why something appealed to people and choosing not to repeat it.
In the end, the conversation circles back to January itself. A month built on optimism, contradiction, and the belief that change starts cleanly on a calendar page. History suggests otherwise. Change is messy, slow, and often theatrical. Sometimes it even involves a roasted peacock.
The full conversation, including the historical detours and the reasoning behind embracing a “bad resolution” mindset, is available on the latest episode of Whiskey@Work, wherever podcasts are available.
Sometimes the most honest way to start a new year isn’t by pretending we’ll be different, but by understanding why we’ve always been the same.
