I heard someone say that their New Year's resolution is "to be a better person."  There are probably people who legitimately use that as one of their resolutions and might actually have some success with it, but to me -- and this will sound pretty mean coming from a fairly negative, crotchety, realistic misanthrope -- it's one of the stupidest things I've ever heard.  From a practical, objective standpoint, how would one measure the success or failure of this goal?  It's too vague to even quantify.  If you said, "My resolution is to let cars go ahead of me when merging," at least you could look back on your behavior and decide whether or not you succeeded.  Or maybe you could say, "I plan to be nice to the checkout people at the supermarket."  Then at least you'd have a legitimate, concrete model to which you could attempt adherence.  But "to be a better person"?  Seriously?  Why not say, "My resolution is to live." #psychology