The Quitting Club

It started, as many bad ideas do, at a barbecue. Four old friends were sitting in Mia's back garden in Sydney, watching the sun go down over the rooftops of Marrickville, when Josh announced that he was thinking of giving up coffee. Everyone laughed, because Josh drank about six flat whites a day. Offended, he challenged the others to quit something too. "One bad habit each," he said. "For a whole month. Starting on Monday."

After a lot of arguing, they agreed. Josh would stop drinking coffee. Mia, who was a nurse and worked long night shifts, promised to stop checking her phone in bed. Tariq, who was training to be an accountant, decided to quit buying things online at two in the morning. And Hannah, a primary school teacher, said she would try not to bite her nails, a habit she had had since she was seven. They called themselves the Quitting Club and created a group chat, where they agreed to report their progress every evening.

The first week was harder than any of them had expected. On Tuesday, Josh stopped to look in the window of his favorite cafe on the way to work, breathed in the smell of fresh coffee and nearly cried. Mia kept her phone in the kitchen, but she woke up at three in the morning, remembered that she hadn't replied to her sister, and spent ten minutes standing in the dark next to the fridge, typing. Tariq deleted three shopping apps and then reinstalled one of them, just to look. Hannah tried wearing gloves while she was marking homework. Her students thought it was very funny.

Strangely, the hardest part was not giving things up. It was remembering to tell the others about it. The group chat stayed silent for days. Everyone meant to write something, but by the time they got home, they had either forgotten or were too tired. On Thursday night, Tariq finally sent a message: "Did anyone remember to report anything?" Nobody replied until Saturday.

So they tried a different approach. Instead of writing every evening, they agreed to meet every Sunday morning for a walk along the coast from Bondi to Coogee. It is much harder to lie to your friends' faces than in a group chat, Mia pointed out, and it is also much harder to forget a meeting when someone is waiting for you on the beach.

The walks changed everything. On the first Sunday, Josh admitted that he had tried drinking green tea instead of coffee, hated it, and then discovered that he quite liked hot chocolate. Mia confessed to her midnight trips to the fridge, and the others suggested buying an old-fashioned alarm clock so that she could leave her phone in another room. Tariq said he had saved over three hundred dollars, which surprised even him. Hannah held up her hands proudly. Her nails were longer than they had been for twenty years.

There were failures too. In the third week, Josh stopped at a petrol station on the way to the airport and drank an enormous coffee without even thinking about it. He felt so guilty that he confessed it on the beach before anyone had even said hello. Instead of criticizing him, the others applauded his honesty, and he promised to keep trying. Tariq remembered buying a pair of expensive trainers at two in the morning, but only when they were delivered to his door.

At the end of the month, the Quitting Club held a final barbecue in Mia's garden. Nobody had been perfect, but everyone had changed something. Josh now drank one coffee a day instead of six, and he actually enjoyed it. Mia was sleeping better than she had in years. Tariq had used the money he had saved to buy his mother a birthday present, which was better than trainers. Hannah had painted her nails bright green to celebrate.

"So what do we quit next month?" asked Josh. The others looked at each other. Nobody wanted to give anything else up, they agreed. But nobody wanted to stop the Sunday walks either.