Resolutions follow the weather

The first of January in Riyadh is a good day to be outside, which is the whole problem with the campaign that runs today.

Every direct-to-consumer playbook has a January section. A fresh start. A better you. The discounted annual membership and the twelve-week programme. It was written for a customer who has spent six weeks indoors eating, who is looking at a dark afternoon and a set of clothes that no longer fit, and who has decided that this year will be different.

Read it here and the assumptions come apart one at a time. The weather will not be better than this until the autumn comes round again. The customer is not shut in, they are out, at a table, at ten at night, in the middle of the only stretch of the year this city gets to spend outdoors. There was no long dark December to react against. Nothing about today feels like a low point to anybody.

The purchases the playbook is aiming at do happen here. They are dated differently. The gym membership that actually gets used is bought in the weeks before the beach in June. The diet with a deadline runs ahead of a wedding, and the weddings cluster before the fasting month. The supplement order, the new routine, the clothes a size down: those follow the month after Eid, when a household has just been reminded what restraint feels like and would like to keep some of it.

None of that is January. All of it is on the calendar, and none of it is in the playbook.

A resolution is a weather event. The calendar that says people change their lives on the first of January was written somewhere it goes dark at four in the afternoon.