Making New Year’s Eve Plans Is the Absolute Worst

Finding NYE plans can be brutal, and you already know all the reasons why. It costs like $8,000 to go to the same place you went for $10 just the day before, none of your friends can agree on the bar, and nobody wants to take control of the situation and be the first to buy tickets—so everyone waits till the last minute and ends up scrambling to find something five hours before everything goes down. So my question is simple. Why do we HAVE to do something on New Year’s Eve?

I’m 26 years old. I point this out for two reasons. One, I’m not that old, so I don’t want the tone of this article to be construed as “you’re just an old fuck who hates fun.” On the contrary, I drink my face off and stay out until 4 a.m. almost every weekend because I’m a very immature (or normal, depending on how you see it) 26. But while I still drink like an idiot, I’m mature enough now where peer pressure and “FOMO” (Fear of Missing Out for those of you who still talk like regular people) don’t matter to me anymore. If my friends ever give me shit for not going out, I have no problem responding with, “Fuck off, I’m tired.” Similarly, if Johnny Pencilpusher at work asks me on Thursday what I did for New Year’s Eve, I really don’t feel embarrassed telling him that I sat alone in my apartment, drank eight beers, watched four hours of The Wire, and passed out with my dick in my hand.

Is that depressing? I don’t know, maybe. But it isn’t any different than what I’d do on any other Tuesday night.

The obligation that comes with finding New Year’s Eve plans is a much bigger annoyance than anything else NYE-related. Once I’m out and I’m at the bar I sacrificed my rent money to get into, I’m gonna have a good time. Dressing up is fine with me. Any time you encourage people to look their best is a good thing. The bar being crowded doesn’t bother me all that much either. Granted, I paid $200 for an open bar deal so I want to get my money’s worth, but I’m also a rational human being so I understand that in a city with eight million people, it may not just be me and my friends at the bar that night. And the price? I mean, the price is the price. Many bars are apparently aware of the concept of supply and demand, so if you want to go out somewhere fabulous on NYE, it’s gonna cost more than “I brought three girls with me, let us in.”

But HAVING to find plans because society tells me I have to? That shit grinds my gears. What are you really missing out on anyway? Going out drinking with your friends? I do that every weekend. Ending the year “in style”? To me ending the year in style means waking up on January 1st, 2014 with my job still intact, my debit card in my wallet, and without a fat stranger drooling on my chest. And that “guaranteed” makeout sesh with a stranger at midnight? I promise you that the same girl who agrees to stick her tongue in your disgusting mouth on New Year’s Eve is willing to do the same thing at the same bar the following weekend. She just won’t look quite as nice, which of course doesn’t really concern you.

So what am I doing this New Year’s Eve? A friend of mine is throwing a party at his NYC apartment, so I’m gonna go there and hopefully have a great time with a bunch of people I know and love. We’ll probably go out afterwards and have to stomach only a small portion of the exorbitant cover prices while still getting to soak up all of the NYE “awesomeness.” But if my friend weren’t throwing a party? I certainly wouldn’t be stressing over trying to organize a bunch of people into whatever party so-and-so reality trash TV star is hosting, because at the end of the day (year), it’s just another night.

If at midnight tonight you find yourself on your friend’s couch, eating Digiorno and playing FIFA, don’t take a bath with your toaster. I promise you’ll get over the Instagram one of your friends took with Macklemore, and that the following morning you’ll be the same exact person as you were the day before.

Find Jimmy T's archive here. He also has a blog, Jimmy's Very Unusual.

[2014 image via Shutterstock]