Greg and Ed ring in 2025 with a difficult look back at their New Year’s Resolutions from 2024. They recognize the obvious: if you don’t keep your resolutions, you only have yourself to blame. But they try to answer the interesting question of whether Bangkok itself might make keeping certain resolutions more difficult.

Ed begins with a confession that he mostly failed in his efforts to improve his Thai. His plan was to study a well-regarded PDF of common Thai expressions, and while he did succeed in having a Thai friend make some recordings, he didn’t spend much time actually studying them. His second resolution was to watch the top ten best Thai films of all time, and watch them in Thai with Thai subtitles. Again, although he downloaded some of the films, he blew off actually doing the hard work. Ugh.

Greg fared somewhat better. Although he failed to watch a movie and read a book about key figures in Thai history, he did manage to spend more time at the Siam Society and develop a new hobby, the Japanese art of archery known as kyudo. Yea Greg!

Ed’s last resolution involved an effort to establish a new ‘third place.’ In this case, some serious effort was put forth at a very Thai local gym, but Ed failed to make any meaningful connections and eventually couldn’t muster the motivation to keep going.

Both guys conclude that expat life can make it difficult to keep these types of ‘self-improvement’ resolutions: expats tend to live in very self-contained bubbles that don’t make it easy to make significant changes to your life. Given this insight into the expat situation, in the end, it’s all on you to find a way to get it done. :)

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