The Problem With New Year’s Eve

Or, why crying and eating bread by yourself on the floor seems appealing

Are you currently thrashing out what you will do on the final night of 2015? Consider this: ‘Crying and Eating Bread by Yourself on the Floor’. 

It sounds like a winning option, doesn’t it? Over 70,000 people on Facebook think so.

‘Crying and Eating Bread by Yourself on the Floor’ is a Facebook event hosted by a university student from Ontario, Sam Foran, that will be held on New Year’s Eve in ‘Sam’s bedroom’. Foran didn’t invite anyone else to the event but before long 35,000 people had ticked ‘attending’ and a further 38,000 are ‘interested’ in joining. In short, the event went viral. 

Why? Because fake Facebook events are trending right now - the more ludicrous the more popular, it would seem. But also because Foran’s event triggers 'me-too-me-too' solidarity. Most people feel sudden lethargy at the prospect of planning a fun-filled NYE. 

Staying in, eating bagels and having an honest cry actually sounds pretty appealing compared to some other ways we could be spending the 31st of December – because, let's lay it on the line, NYE evening is inevitably disappointing. 

The thing is, if you already plan to do a pretty depressing thing, and have no hopes of an evening filled with fireworks (real and emotional) then you will probably have an OK time. 

Here are a handful of classic NYE experiences everyone has before all hopes of the event ever being a total hoot are shattered:

1. The one where you have a city centre blow out but spend most of it complaining about how expensive everything is and how much your shoes hurt. It feels like an endurance test: the longest night of the year. Then you decide to get a cab home but don’t manage to hail one until 2nd January. 

2. The one where you really care about kissing someone at midnight. Because you’re single and some unhelpful person once said ‘the way you spend New Year’s Eve is the same way you’ll spend the rest of the year’. This distressing, sentimental soundbite has stuck - like chewing gum in your hair - even though you know it’s rubbish. Why, brain, why? 

3. The one where you have a dinner party but drink too much too fast near the sofa and are asleep before midnight.

Source: Giphy

4. The one where you pretend it isn’t happening and schedule some nourishing me-time. Me-time ends up being a seven-hour session watching roving TV reporters interview NYE revellers worldwide: all of them are having a better time than you. Then midnight happens anyway and your phone lights up with ‘Happy New Year’ messages. People are thinking about you. It’s totally emotional. Cue weeping. 

5. The one where you go to Scotland, because Hogmanay. However, when you get there the street parade is cancelled due to dreadful weather so you cram yourself into a bar with the thousands of other people who don’t want to be outside and snog a man in a kilt (read: a man who is not wearing any pants). 

So, this year we’re making a New Year’s Eve resolution: we will have low expectations. Expectations as low as Sam Foran’s even: ‘I like crying. I like eating bread. I like being by myself. I like lying on the floor. I thought I would combine all four into one epic night of self-pity and regret.’

At least this way you can only be pleasantly surprised with how the evening turns out.