Well, it’s the first week of January. Can we ditch the New Year’s resolutions yet? You know it’s going to happen sooner or later. According to FiveThirtyEight, the statistical nerd website, by August only 45 percent of resolvers will still be keeping to their resolutions. And you know at least half of those will be lying about it.

I recently heard an interview on the subject of medical costs. It suggested health care policy analysts are well aware that we are a nation of back sliders. The good news in the interview was that everyone in the health biz is focused on the problem of ever escalading medical costs. They are rising faster than wages, tax revenues and therefore the ability of people to pay for them.

According to the invaluable Stein’s Law, “if something can’t go on forever, it will stop.” So health costs can’t outrun out ability to pay for them forever. Something’s got to give. The good news is people have noticed this. The bad news comes in at least two parts. First, the population is aging and the huge wave of baby boomers is about to spend several decades requiring ever increasing outlays for drugs, surgeries, nursing homes, physical therapy, the complete catastrophe, as Zorba says of marriage.

First is bad enough, but irremediable, short of euthanasia. Second, however, brings us back to New Year’s resolutions. Everybody knows what they ought to do to be healthier. Eat right and less, exercise more, sleep well, avoid stress, no drinks, no smokes, no other amusing substances, austerity, purity, moderation. And nobody pays any attention, or only a few saintly showoffs or California surfers and yoga instructor that give the rest of us heartburn.

We’d like to look fit, feel fit, be fit, but we sure don’t like what it takes to get there. So many of us resign ourselves to dragging our weary bones to the finish line failing miserably. Our patron saint is Augustine, who said of the sins of the flesh, “make me chaste but not yet.”

In this procrastinating spirit, we go on diets but not for long. We resolve to exercise long enough to write the check for the gym membership or the personal trainer, but then don’t use them. These are great business models. People pay you for weight loss or exercise services, don’t use them, then shamefacedly pay you for some more. Our weakness of will is a gold mine, a permanent annuity for those who promise to help us change our ways.

Why are we so infirm in our resolve? Because exercising and dieting are hard and unpleasant. Some people claim to get a high from exercise but this is probably oxygen deprivation talking. Most of us get shin splints, muscle strains, foot deformities requiring special expensive shoes, neck pain, back pain. I could go on. Diet same thing. The end is so far off the tasty substances so near to hand.

Death is bad but inevitable and far off, we hope. Kale on the lunch plate is immediate and bitter. Telling ourselves we will exercise tomorrow is peaceful and lulling. Fitbit is a nag telling us we have walked too few steps, eaten too many calories, slept too few hours. What would you rather hear – that or the waiter telling you today’s specials?

Many of us can’t help feeling that the pains of aging are bad enough without seeking out new ones. And the math is not in favor of fitness and abstemiousness. If all this effort and deprivation would add twenty years to our lives, we might fall for it. But only if the twenty years were between the ages of 20 and 40. But that’s not the deal. We are haggling over an extension of the years between 75 and 95? Have you taken a good close look at those lately? They are the physical and mental equivalent of an acre of kale and a month of pushups. The more you do such a calculus, the more you begin to think George S. Kaufman was right. He said he planned to kill himself at 100. “How?” The straight man asked. “With kindness.”

And though our body is a temple, are we really sure all the quinoa eating and aerobicizing will get us a pass when we get to heaven? I imagine the gatekeeper asking what we did with our days on earth and after we answer, I hear his stern voice saying: “Oh, so you’re one of those. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity. Zumba, Jazzercise, the Paleo diet, hot yoga? You have got to be kidding me. ” (I imagine St. Peter speaking in the voice of John McEnroe berating a line judge). Won’t he perhaps think we were obsessed merely with looking good to members of the opposite sex or prolonging our time on earth?

“Seems like you were pretty anxious to avoid showing up here? You were given life to do good and you spent hours and hours every day sweating to the oldies and eating like an ungulate, a ruminant. For what? To hang around a few years longer taking spin classes and mulching vegetable matter in your Vitamix? Next!”

That’s why I plan to exercise and eat right until I don’t. At which point I expect to heave a great, fat sigh of relief and say, “Pass the hollandaise, please.“