Pack up your pancakes, because Lent is upon us. In a secular age, the Christian festival of self-denial is weirdly popular. This is because we’ve rebranded it as a sort of liturgical Movember, in which we indulge our vanity with silly juice fasts, as if Jesus spent 40 days in the desert working on his beach body.

I’m as bad as anyone. Every year I give something up for the wrong reasons. It’s never: “How, my God, may I draw nearer to thee?” Instead I wonder: “How, when I take my shirt off, can I make it look less like a deflated beanbag?”

It’s always self-defeating. Trying to give up sugar led to me stealth-eating more of the stuff than I had in the preceding three months. Another year I tried to give up bread, but without a regular toast-injection I just slept in every day and nearly lost my job. Bread was literally the reason I was getting out of bed in the morning. So this year is different. I’ve given it a little more thought – about 14 minutes – and here are nine things I should actually give up for Lent:

1. Believing I will ever get out of bed at 8am on a Saturday in order to do laps of the park with members of my local community. I joined a class, which means every weekend I should be doing exactly this. They gave me a personalised barcode so I could track my progress, do time trials, be better than myself. But I’m not better than myself. I am myself. I’d desperately like to be them, these trim narcissists in technical fabrics who churn up the mud at 8am. But sleep followed by croissant makes more sense to me; why add a side-order of self-delusion?

2. Drinking. Many people give up drinking because they enjoy it too much. I should give up because I don’t like the taste. I can’t think of a situation in which I wouldn’t choose hot chocolate over a pint. Unfortunately people react to this admission in roughly the same way as if I’d told them I am sexually attracted to owls. So I get around it by drinking the least alcoholic tasting stuff. I once went on a bachelor party to Berlin with proper men, outraged at my ordering cocktails on the round system. “Nine pints of lager and a Pink Squirrel” is apparently a “stag-ruiner”. That’s quite a good name for a cocktail, actually.

3. Trying to be cool. When people ask me: “What’s that you’re listening to?” I won’t lie, and mutter something vague about “Kendrick Lamar” or “FKA Twigs”. I’ll say: “It is Maneater by Hall & Oates. I don’t care.”

4. Being mean. Even when it’s funny. My friend Victoria frequently comes to me for support, with stories like: “Had an awful drink with this guy – he turned up late, smelling of booze, texted the whole time, and I found out he’s on trial for murder.” I always, always respond, after a pause: “Yes, but how was the sex?” We both laugh, but I laugh a bit harder and this makes me a bad friend.

5. Trying hats. You’ve either got a head for hats or you don’t. There’s no new fashion of hat that will make people think: “Who’s that? He looks cool.” (See 3.)

6. Cashier-less checkouts. I embraced the self-serve galley, as the result of a previous vow to give up human interaction entirely. I loved their flirtatiousness, coquettish welcome, the robo-frisson of: “Would you like to continue?” The future is going to be sexy! Then the very second you’re done, it’s: “Please take your items”, restated at four-second intervals, with clinical brusqueness. I miss people.

7. Walking out of the room and turning off the light while someone else is still in the room. People don’t like this.

8. Thinking of bank holidays as “hygiene sabbaticals”.

9. Pretending I’ll read all the books. What do Thomas Piketty and Anna Karenina have in common? They’re both under my bedside table. Not on it; under it, being its legs. Literature has many uses: doorstops, step-stools, short-term mouse blockades, counterbalancing bookends for other books. That we will not, and cannot, read one one-thousandth of the books our souls notionally depend on is an existential burden. We must release ourselves.

The rest of the whole self-improvement agenda can go hang. We all imagine our better selves running ahead, calling back to us impatiently with the skin of a 20-year-old and the stomach of a god. But there are loads of better versions of yourself closer to hand. There’s a less cynical you. There’s a you who takes better care in relationships, and helps other people. A you who spends every weekend for a year building the Millennium Falcon out of loofahs. The Glycaemic Index-watching, alfalfa-eating, image-sculpting, optimum consumer you? Screw that guy.

Let’s be honest, we’ve only got stuff to give up at Lent because we failed to give it up at New Year. This year I’m giving up on giving up, and you should join me. I am a lazy man with a freakishly small head, drunk on alcopops. I am myself.