I had a horrible moment of panic in the hair salon this week. It wasn’t because the hairdresser had lopped too much off one side or because my highlights had turned out an odd shade of orange, but because I realised that I am something of a failure as a woman.

Flicking through a glossy magazine while waiting for the reddish-brown gunge pasted all over my head to work its magic, I came across an article entitled ‘20 Ways to a New You in the New Year’. As I read through the 20 beauty and fitness tips I realised, balefully, that I had tried and failed to adopt more or less all of them in Januarys gone by.

Every New Year, I have pledged to take up new regimes that would transform my toxic, blubbery, post-Christmas self into a buff and trim thing of beauty by the spring. And every year I have foundered.

More than one gym membership has expired without ever really being used and my pilates and yoga DVDs languish dusty and unwatched. Somewhere in my kitchen, vitamin tablets and herbal teas moulder and pass their sell-by date. Despite my very best intentions, my hair has never been deep-conditioned on a weekly basis, my cuticles are forever ragged and umpteen allegedly transformative skin creams have congealed in their tubes rather than being slathered on my person every morning.

The stark realisation that I am utterly and apathetically incapable of maintaining the proper habits of a grown-up lady would have sent me running from the salon in anguish but for the fact that I had a towel, a protective cape and a small plastic bib around my shoulders, not to mention the paper-and-plastic highlight flaps stuck to my head.

I could probably live with being a bit unkempt on the outside, but my inability to follow through on resolutions is not limited to skincare and exercise. Over the years, I have drawn up all sorts of grand plans in relation to money management, time management, relationships and everything else besides. No matter how carefully constructed the plans, they inevitably seem to crash into pieces somewhere between the second and third week in January.

I’m the same messy, disorganised, financially impaired, averse-to-exercise glutton I was as a kid. To make matters worse, I didn’t smoke or go boozing back then so, despite my every earnest attempt at self-improvement, I’ve actually managed to disimprove with age.

So why do I do it? Why do I decide every January that this is the year I’ll make myself over and become a better person? Am I really so racked with self-loathing and insecurities that I can’t accept who I am and get on with things? Am I so devoid of motivation and self-control that I can’t make a plan and stick to it? And why, at the age of 29, have I not realised that it would be better to make no resolutions rather than endure the self-censure and regret that accompanies the inevitable resolution-breaking?

I know I’m not the only person who embarks on these doomed programmes of self-improvement. One of my favourite websites is the oddly compelling 43things.com, used by tens of thousands of people around the world to compile lists of 43 goals they want to achieve in life. It’s an exhausting catalogue of global good intentions. No matter who they are or where they are, people want to better themselves. They want to lose weight, read more, or learn a new skill or another language.

Besides being able to see what people want to change about their lives and how many people share each goal, you can also see how many have achieved each goal. Unsurprisingly, the number of people who have ticked anything off their lists is completely dwarfed by the hordes that have got as far as making the list but no further.

Even more disheartening than the thought of all those dissatisfied people is the mundanity of some of their goals. A total of 833 people have “floss every day” as one of their 43 targets. Can anybody’s life be so banal (or worse, so fulfilled) that flossing becomes a top priority?

Some of the contributors to 43things have realised the futility of trying to change the essence of who “they” are and have opted for less worthy goals: 450 want to “learn how to tie the stem of a maraschino cherry with my tongue”, six people want to “eat a crayon”, and five hope someday to “beat someone to death with a can of peas”.

Leaving aside that small minority, I have to wonder about the thousands of other people who use the site and the millions more who will make resolutions tomorrow. Can we all be so unhappy with ourselves that we feel the fervid need to shape up? Or have we been brainwashed by the cynical feel-good and self-help industries into thinking that we can all be perfect people with perfect lives, if only we try just that little bit harder?

I don’t think so. The yen for self-improvement is a fundamental part of human nature. People are flawed. They always were. Depending on which Google result you believe, the practice of making New Year’s resolutions dates back either 4,000 years to ancient Babylon — when the most popular resolution was to return borrowed farm equipment — or 2,000 years to ancient Rome, when people would seek forgiveness from their enemies and promise to be a bit nicer in future.

Either way, I find it consoling that people have always been conscious of their failings and determined to do better, even if they never quite managed it. In fact, I’m rather cheered at the idea of an ancient Babylonian tossing and turning in bed (or goatskin), feeling guilty about not giving that seed drill back to Belshezzar. Likewise, it’s pleasing to imagine Marcus and Lucia deciding not to sit in with a pitcher of wine but to head out to the Circus Maximus for the night and enjoy themselves without falling out with any of their fellow citizens.

Maybe New Year’s resolutions stem from our feelings of inadequacy or inferiority, but we wouldn’t make them if we didn’t believe that, this time, we might just follow through. Resolutions are the ultimate triumph of hope over experience, a nub of idealistic optimism in the darkest days of winter.

So I’ll sit down tomorrow, make my list, stick it on the fridge and do my utmost to live a better life in 2007. I probably won’t succeed but I’m going to try. And the fact that I went to get my highlights done at all surely means that I’m not entirely a failure as a grown-up woman. There’s hope yet.

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