Detox is so 2018. The thing to do this year is to reset. To pretend that the old did not exist — that you (I) did not overeat, overdrink and under-exercise, and even if you did, it was just a couple of years. Except it’s been over 10 years, but in a last-ditch effort you think you can get back to how you looked and felt at 22: smiling with no sign of wryness, looking out from photos (and at life) with hope and no cynicism, imagining that life after 25 did not exist.

Reset is a word that the generation introduced to the internet in college, knows. We’ve reset many passwords in life. And restored many mobile phones to factory settings. Now, we’re attempting to do it with life itself. You can do a ‘reset diet’ that will (alluringly) change your metabolism, wiping out the effects of all the cheese you’ve ever eaten. On the internet, it sounds (suspiciously) easy: “Eat anti-inflammatory foods,” is one suggestion. Try intermittent fasting, says another. “Replace your breakfast, lunch and dinner with white, red and green smoothies, respectively,” says a third, imaginatively.

Why do we feel this need to reset? We see our parents age, and discover the first signs of wear-and-tear ourselves (knee pain, back ache, er urinary incontinence). Most of us don’t want to be in doctor’s clinics or worse, in hospitals. We’ve seen cancer hit people much younger than us, diabetes and hypertension take away the joy of life. And we’re scared.

Many people are turning to naturopathy, where the first step in the process of this reset is to cleanse the system in a variety of ways. A friend paid ₹7500 a night for a 21-day cleanse, where she was given bitter herbs to drink so her body purged. Another went abroad, because she felt a month-long break could do it. Yet another quit her job to focus on restructuring her life around eating healthy and exercising, so once she gets back to work, the new lifestyle would stay with her. We’re trying to change old patterns, habits; attempting to break groundhog day.

A reset is a fresh start, a feeling and determination that this time, we will be better people, that we will not fail at resisting that death-by-chocolate cake, that we will be in perfect balance at all times — even when our adult children do not put the dirty clothes into the basket. Sometimes though, a reset is to recapture a little bit of youth, so we look perfect at that college reunion.

In a scene from the movie Boyhood, the single mother, who has been through marriage, divorce, bringing up children, working hard for a career, sits at the dining table on the eve of sending her son off to college. “I just… thought there would be more,” she says. Perhaps she too needed a reset. Then, there is always the hope of more.