By Katerina Mansour, Staff Writer

Published in print Jan 14, 2015.

New Year’s is a common celebration holiday to many. It’s perfect! Drinking, fun, no presents, no pressure, just good times. But as you nurture your first hangover of the year, you might want to rethink some of the things that actually make New Year’s sort of suck.

New Year’s Parties

On New Year’s Eve the majority of us are partying our way into the next year, whether we truly wanted to or not. Everyone’s expectations of a good time are set high, and no one is going home until that happens. So why do these new years parties suck?

If you go out to a bar, everything is outrageously overpriced, as all drink prices have been hiked for the sake of this ‘awesome’ night in which everyone has to partake.

On top of that, getting a cab ride home will be almost impossible, and when you finally do, they will likely have hiked their prices as well. So you probably wasted more money on things you really shouldn’t have, since you were already broke from the holidays.

Not to mention many people probably also got sickeningly drunk and ended up making out with some loser. After all, the night would be ruined if there wasn’t a kiss at midnight, wouldn’t it? And they probably ended up puking up that ‘last thing you’ll ever eat in 2014!’ that you made such a big deal about earlier in the night.

Bottom line: these parties/outings you partake in because being alone on new years would just be too depressing, are a waste of time and money, and a festering pool of poor decisions.

But wait, isn’t that the definition of every ‘party’ for someone in their twenties?

New Year’s Resolutions

As much as it sucks to say, the truth is you are probably not going to follow through with your resolutions, and this new year is not likely to be ‘your’ year. Every year it’s the same. You make a bunch of promises to yourself, or your friends and family. You get psyched about everything from losing that weight you gained over the holidays, starting that new job you really need, or to finally stop one or many of your bad habits.

The truth is, this year you are going to be the same exact person you were last year. You are going to eat all the junk food you always have, you are going to be as lazy as you always have been, and you are not likely to break your bad habits. Change does not happen in the blink of an eye, and the pressure of new years resolutions just ends up annoying us more than inspiring us to be better people.

New Year’s Blues

Many of us have experienced it. After the bliss of Christmas and other holidays, our break comes to an end, and as the new year begins, so does another semester. Another year has passed, and another one begins, one in which you will likely once again have no idea what you are doing with your life. But hey, let’s drink up, at least we have our health, as they say!

So what exactly is my point? The pressure of going out and having a good time on New Year’s eve, on top of the pressure of all your phony resolutions and promises for the new year, are bogus, and the entire holiday itself really isn’t worth all the fuss and commotion. If you want to make important changes in your life, make them because you both want and need to, not because it’s the 1st of January or you feel like you have to, to meet some crazy societal expectation.