How to win at New Year’s

It has been just three days into 2015 and there are already countless analyses that tell you how to deal with life, love, books and even food. I’ve narrowed it down to two approaches used by those who make the decisions for you — the passive and the aggressive.

The passive approach is subtle but not too submissive. Consider this — the ‘promotions’ tab of your inbox (assuming you’re using Gmail like every other person) by now would’ve been filled with emails titled ‘The joy of starting a New Year’ or ‘Our Must-Haves for the New Year’ and even the innocuous-seeming ‘Wishing you a very happy & a prosperous new year’. These emails aren’t mere greetings, but effectively a sales pitch, with a hope that consumers will click on them, while checking on their bank accounts on the side, and get drawn by superfluous commodities that are always necessary.

If we aren’t drawn by commercial sales pitches, there are always DIYs and listicles that tell us what beauty products we need, which movie will change our lives, how to better eat a cream biscuit (always dunk it in milk), what books we 

have  to read this year and how to get more reading done. And the answer is never as simple as “just open a book and start reading when you have the time.”

Aggressive approaches are, in my opinion, lesser of the two evils. They’re obviously true to their name and they stop at nothing. They hound you wherever you go, on all devices you access and in any form of communication. I once received a sale notification via text message, Whatsapp, Facebook, email and a call. I ran away from this sale as far as possible. Having said that, what does one take away from this? Never trust an instructable, not even this one.