Time & Perspective Quote by John Oldham

A New Year vow to quit smoking lands as comedy first, confession second: the sentence is built to undercut itself. Oldham sets up the familiar self-improvement script ("One of my resolutions...") then immediately punctures it with the admission of repeat failure. The punchline is structural: he can only promise commitment by narrating his inability to keep promises. That tension is the engine. It works because it performs the very cycle it describes: aspiration, relapse, renewed confidence, and a public attempt to make the confidence real.

Calling him a "celebrity" matters. This reads like an early version of the modern public mea culpa, where self-control becomes part of the persona and the audience functions as accountability theater. The line "I've tried for the past two years" is a quiet bid for sympathy and credibility: I'm not lazy, I'm struggling. Then "this year I am going to stick with it" is less a plan than a charm, a phrase meant to conjure willpower by saying it out loud.

The specific intent is reputational as much as personal. He wants to be seen wanting to change, which is a safer social position than simply failing in private. The subtext is that addiction (or habit) has already won the narrative; the best he can do is reset the story on a calendar. The context is seasonal ritual: New Year resolutions as culturally approved reinvention, a brief window where optimism gets to masquerade as strategy.