Everything is always going to be a great and happy new year when anxious piss heads are waiting eagerly for their beloved countdown so they can raise a glass and sing that famous Burns poem. Well, the first couple of verses at the most. This is if they aren’t too busy wasting what’s left of their money, fighting each other or throwing up. Then a few days later when we have all settled down, the dreaded moment comes when it’s time to go back to work and the shite that was apparently over gets to start again until these false convictions of change and prosperity are brought out once more for the next year after being put away with all of the christmas decorations.

So what substantiates a new year? Why do we need it to make important, critical changes to our lives? What is it going to do to facilitate these changes in our attitudes and behaviour? Well the simple answers are that we don’t and it isn’t.

£70 to get home? You must be taking the piss!
When you’re queuing up for your triple time taxi home from <insert venue with prosperous “night life” here>, it begins to set in that the world isn’t such a better place with the tick of a clock and your decisions are none the wiser for it. This illustrates how in the UK there is a system of poor judgement that life changing turn-outs for the best are going to happen for you without any actual doing required on your part. In reality, every other day of the year, nobody actually gives a shit about the stroke of midnight and all these changes are put off until we think about them again at some other time, most conveniently next year. All situations are accepted “for now” and this complacency begins to erode this “fresh, new start” making the cycle complete.

This problem stays with you when your new years bender of excessive food and ridiculous amounts of alcohol are gone, along with the colossal amount of money you wasted on providing them for yourself. Armies of hung-over zombies walk into their workplaces and hang their heads in pain and nausea when they once again assume their positions and begin to come out with the same old shit. It’s very generalist of me to say so but it’s the same shit I hear all the time; “I can’t wait for this weekend,” “I need a new job” (without actually having the conviction to go and look for one), “I can’t be assed” and my favourite, “I can’t come in today I’m not feeling very well.” This occurred to me when I noticed how much easier it is to get a doctors appointment on a Friday afternoon in contrast with that of Monday morning, when there is a significantly better chance of getting time off work on the sick. Conveniently, it fits in with the week long self-certification period employees are entitled to so that the doctors appointment checks another box on the back to work form without any accountability required thus avoiding the dreaded disciplinary action. Arse is successfully covered.

Sick of This Place
Every time I have turned up for work somewhere, it’s the standard workplace hypocrisy. “I’m sick of this place,” “I want a new job.” It’s interesting to note that this comes from the same cunts who also slag off the people on jobseeker’s that it’s easy to get a job at the same time as having an excuse to keep their own woes insubstantiated, namely “there’s no other jobs out there” (whichever suits their prejudice at the time). Every single time it’s always been a great soundbite in order to show contempt for their employers and nothing more. No intention to even try to look for another job is demonstrated and no self-improvement is made. Interestingly enough, at times when I have made the same claim, I get “do something about it then” barked at me by exactly the same people. Dizzy new heights of saying one thing and doing another, only too habitual of the place where I live. Once again I don’t like to generalise, but this case scenario has happened everywhere I’ve worked with the same gobshite people casting the same judgements on others while failing to stick to the same “for the sake of it” convictions. Pathetic.

In contrast, I’ve seen people stick to their guns and make something of themselves. Whether it’s going back into education to escape the playground of the shop floor or to move up in the company with positions of responsibility and skill. Unlike the typical gobshite sound bite hypocrite, every single time I’ve seen this it’s been in a quiet person who would rather get on with it than tell everyone else what their personal plans and opinions are. There wasn’t much bigotry going on either. To consider an employer’s perspective, I can see why this is. An objective person who speaks with their actions commands a much greater respect than a bad tempered loud mouth who spends most of his day banging on about what other people should be doing, proudly advertising what a shining example of a human being he is while doing his very best to make bad examples of others. There’s always one in every workplace, which is a shame really. Let’s hope the tabloid newspapers keep going so these people have an abundant flow of opinions to inflict on other people, for comedy value at least.

I’ll Do it Later
UK complacency (along with its thriving track record of hypocrisy) is rife. Millions of people are inflicting themselves with misery and whining about it because they can’t be bothered to do something different with their lives or be the change that they need to make. This takes up terabytes of data on servers and wastes so much electricity with all of the shit status updates about what’s on TV or how much they hate their lives, while at the same time doing absolutely nothing that makes a difference. We put up with bullshit like massive queues that they don’t seem to have in every other country that I’ve ever visited, insane petrol prices because nobody wants to miss corrie while they’re out protesting, businesses that rip people off and take the absolute piss because of this “it’ll be reight” and “fair dooooos” culture applied to the thought of dealing with this bollocks, allowing a double standard in law to continue while new laws are being made to further micro-manage our behaviour and take more money out of our pockets.

Not to worry, though. There’s always tomorrow to bring in the “new year, fresh new start for me.” That’s the problem here. Tomorrow never comes.