Regardless of where you will be or whom you will surround yourself with, let’s face it, more often than not, New Year’s Eve always turns out to be a countdown to nothing, absolute nothingness, and it’s always usually anticlimactic.

You’re either counting down to palpable loneliness, an unfulfilled night, a regret or two (or three) or just the feeling of melancholy and depression as you sat perched in your local pub where the queue to the bar is miles long and the reek of desperation to have a good time lingers even longer.

So many expectations are placed on us to ‘live it up’ on a day when taxis charge extraordinary prices just so you can go to bed at 7 am, hungover and almost usually alone when all you want to do is vegetate in your bedroom and eat pizza leftovers from the night before. Yet there you are, surrounded by the very worse of what humanity has to offer as you drown your sorrows and wallow in downcast retrospect in a past year of failures, disappointments and regrets. And all because you feel internalised pressure and external social conformity to have a good time for fear of missing out on the last day of the year.

New Year's Eve is designed to convince you to part with your hard-earned minimum wage income just so you can feel part of something ‘special’, with that special feeling normally leaving you broke and regretting the previous night’s drunken escapades the next day. And because it’s New Year’s Eve, you have to pay extra money for these special experiences too. Everything is that little bit more expensive and everyone is just that little bit more intoxicated.

New Year’s Eve is just a sad realisation that you are lonely and single and that nobody loves you. The sound of glasses clinking and people smooching a convenient stranger within close proximity just to feel some kind of temporary validation is only a mere ten seconds away as the inevitable countdown begins.

Desperately looking around the crowded room to see whom you can predictably screech ‘’happy new year’’ at the top of your lungs only to have a sudden realization that everyone is already happily coupled and that you are all alone, very very alone. And what of those New Year resolutions that you always pledge to make to yourself each and every year? They never come to fruition because the prospect of another year vehemently feels you with intensified anxiety and dread.

That weight you promised yourself that you would lose inevitably piled on.

That dept you vowed to pay off just got further in the red.

That new hobby you said that you would pursue ended up being just another empty promise.

So here you are as the clock strikes midnight repeating the same repetitive psychological cycle as you raise your glass to the start of another new year.