Heres Why New Years Eve is Bad Now

This is video that saw while was swiping showing the difference between New Year's Eve in 2002 and New Year's Eve 2004. And they are definitely different vibes. And there are comments that are proposing hypotheses basically about why exactly this is. Everyone's tired. We used to be happy for next year. Now we just all stand around like what's next? We peaked as species in the late 90s, early 2000s. Yeah, well back in 2002, life was still affordable if you had normal job. The phones have made us lifeless. The overall sense was that like everything is bad now and it wasn't back then and wasn't like totally convinced that that was going on here. But also in my head formed private hypothesis. People are so much more isolated and scared now because that's my bias. Like I'm pretty sure that's thing. I'm pretty sure the data back me up. That is thing that anchor to. But it's also like terrifying thought. We might be the first generation in human history to simply forget how to do things together. But look, it's also true that things are more unaffordable. feel like went on with my day, but kept this idea in my head of like, my god, New Year's sucks. Now people can't figure out how to be together anymore. There's probably some kind of bad thing going on here." And then actually like did New Year's kind of like it was just like small group. Like at 10:00 we watched the ball drop on East Coast time in Time Square. And have to admit, this looked pretty bad. Like the energy felt very thin, like signal being broadcast from dead star. That's how felt watching this. And was like, "Yeah, okay. Well, whatever it is, New Year's does definitely suck more now. But then the next morning, was in my bed and was once again scrolling and saw something that completely changed my mind. 5 2 1. This is video of the Los Angeles Smoking Deaths billboard, which has been up since around 1987. Originally erected by single human man who had been smoker, but after getting some money in the coin operated laundry business, wanted to personally raise awareness about the dangers of smoking. It is earnest. It's little clunky. It's very human. It's monument to one man's regret and his hope that others might avoid his fate. Paid for by the coin operated laundry business originally. Now it's supported by the American Art Association and Association and Cancer Society, etc. But that's not really the point. just read an article about the guy who put this billboard up originally in the 80s and it's cool. THE POINT IS THE PARTY. THIS IS COOL PARTY. One thing you can say for sure is that the billboard and the resulting weird block party is not the result of bunch of executives trying to figure out how to make like the coolest thing happen so that they could broadcast it and monetize it. So, the LA Times article read about this was from 2012, and it said that on New Year's Eve, smattering of folks had some pretty weird traditions of coming by and watching the billboard click over to zero at the new year. think it's safe to say in the last 12 years, the vibe has changed substantially, assume, because of the internet. Like, people would film it. As it clicked over, more and more people saw that they thought that it was cool, and they're like, I'm going to go buy and see it. And thus, an entirely organic block party has appeared. If you want to know where the 2025 New Year's Eve VIBES ARE, THEY'RE AT the Los Angeles Smoking Deaths Billboard on Santa Monica. And the more think about this, the more it makes perfect sense. I'm going to hit you with like very 2015 take right now, but sometimes things take while to seep through to the rest of the culture, but authenticity is like big deal now. And on the internet, we have authenticity abundance, but with some of our more stayed traditions, we have an authenticity famine. I'm not sure that anyone in the world could ever imagine something less authentic than two Gen Xers who have flown to New York City specifically to go to Times Square for New Year's Eve wearing super tall hats that are super tall specifically so that there's enough space for Planet Fitness logo on New Year's Eve kissing in the area specially reserved for people who had agreed to be filmed while kissing wearing Planet Fitness billboards on their heads. LIKE WHAT IS HAPPENING in Time Square New Year's Eve? is not celebration anymore. IT'S NOT PEOPLE coming together. IT IS SIMULATION OF PARTY. The primary goal is not joy or connection. It is the delivery of eyeballs to purple and yellow gym franchise. Even the people attending the thing aren't really there cuz they want to party. They're there because they want to be on TV. They want to be part of the tradition. And that tradition has long since passed any kind of cultural relevancy. It happened. And apparently we didn't notice. Maybe we didn't notice because we were undergoing kind of massive migration. For the past 20 years, most of our cultural evolution has not been happening on street corners or in community centers. And it certainly hasn't been happening on network television. It's been happening in non-physical spaces on the internet. We moved the party to the internet because the vibes there felt new and they felt limitless and you never knew what weird thing was going to happen or who was going to connect with who. And more than anything, we could all spy on that. We could all like imagine ourselves being part of it. Even if we weren't really part of it, it felt like we were. While that happened, Times Square New Year's Eve completely initified. It was not important. It was just like the thing that was still going. But y'all, guess what has happened? The Planet Fitness hats have followed us. We started hanging billboards all over our digital squares, optimizing our feeds not for connection or for good feelings, but for the primary stakeholder of the ad revenue model. Our digital spaces are becoming more and more like Times Square. Hanging advertisements on everything and increasingly not for providing value to us, but for us being the value being provided for someone else, Planet Fitness. And as these spaces have started to feel less like home and more like freaking shopping mall, we're starting to feel the weight of that non-physical life. We're starting to maybe feel like this is mistake. We're starting to look for place to stand where nobody IS NOBODY'S TRYING TO SELL US MEMBERSHIP. So if it's about authenticity, the internet is losing that. And now try to imagine something that's more authentic than an unauthorized block party gathered around an object that marks the new YEAR ENTIRELY BY DEFAULT RATHER THAN BY DESIGN. IT'S NOT EVEN MEANT TO do the thing it's doing. The fact that it is literal billboard MAKES THIS ALL THE BETTER. IT'S THE ONLY ADVERTISEMENT IN SIGHT, but it's generational. It's older than most of the people at the gathering. young people, drunk people, people who are not about to go eat DINNER AT TGI FRIDAYS. THE TIMES Square New Year's Eve is the most homogenized thing possible so that it's palatable not just to the entire country, but to the primary stakeholder of the advertisers. Times Square is literally public square, but the desire to monetize every square inch of it has turned it into the most boring party imaginable. And what do we do with that? Do we say, "Yeah, guess you own our public square." No. No. You don't get to have our our public square. You don't get to have our yearly milestone. WE CAN MAKE OUR OWN. CAN you imagine humans making culture in the physical world? And the best part is that like completely authentically the traditions stack themselves. Everyone celebrates when it goes to zero. And that's celebration of the new year, but also of the literal only moment at the beginning of the year when no one has yet died of smoking related illness. And then it clicks over to one and everyone together CAN SHOUT, NO." BUT JUST in case anybody was worried that we had lost some sense of ironic detachment, CAR PAINTED WITH THE MARLBORO logo drives by. And as 45year-old Kermagin, can it's easy for me to look at that car and be like, my god, the nihilism is back." But don't think that's what it is. Our culture has become so saturated with performance that irony has become necessary. It's survival tool. We use it as shield. We joke because being sincere in world that only wants to ever monetize your sincerity is kind of dangerous. But look closer at the crowd. The irony isn't the point. It's the gateway. They're using this weird situation as way to create space where authentic connection and sincere enjoyment can actually breathe little bit. They're laughing at the Marbor car. But more than anything, think what everybody like loved watching it and the people who were there loved being there unless they were stuck in the traffic behind it. People are being together. Like we've reached the point where in order to be sincere, maybe we do have to wrap it in layer of the absurd. wish we weren't there. But if that's the way through, then let's do that. It's weird. It's little sad that it's necessary, but it doesn't mean that the heart of the connection isn't real. In fact, it's like definitely real. It's real vibe. And like the internet has done things like this before. Like there's the Chicago rat hole, which is an accidental imprint of rodent in wet concrete that has become kind of place of pilgrimage. Not because tourism board thought, "Yeah, we should make that rat hole something." But like specifically because they never would. We chose it. Just like we chose the Boston cop slide. Everybody collectively decides that poorly designed piece of playground equipment is very good. It's the binley mega chippy. It's these places where in the absence of meaning, we apply meaning absurdly in way that think is actually beautiful and that like want in world where we are don't like do think to some extent unnecessarily nihilistic, unnecessarily critical of absolutely everything. When we can't like find anything that we can believe in, the humanity leaks through the drywall and says like, am still here. am at Binley Mega Chippy and the Chicago rat hole. am weird and am human and am not for sale." think we should keep doing this and like applying any kind of structure to it ruins it. But like just in your normal life, look for the glitches. Look for the ways that we can hack little moments to make them weird. we can support things built and done by weirdos who have this weirdo vision of the world. Just go out there in the world and look for and appreciate the unpolished. Because what thought was seeing was that nobody knew how to come together or that nobody wanted to party anymore. We just stare at the wall cuz everything's so terrible. That's not what's happened. This wasn't people don't know how to party anymore. This is just people rejecting the fakest party that has ever existed. While at the Los Angeles Smoking Guts billboard, the actual New Year's Eve party was happening. People took infrastructure that was meant for one meaning and they gave it completely new meaning. People are figuring out, and not intentionally, not because they know how they're doing it, just because we're pulled toward this. They're figuring out how to be the authors of their own culture rather than having the least authentic and most monetized culture imposed upon them. And love that. love it. There's something very hopeful about this, about group of people standing on dirty sidewalk in Los Angeles on Santa Monica cheering for giant digital counter. It says like we will find each other. We will create culture. We will find ways to do it. And have to say there is danger here because the moment we find something real, people will TRY TO BUY IT. AND IF WAKE UP tomorrow and find that like Khi or DraftKings has like figured out how to sponsor the Smoking Guts Billboard New Year's Eve party, if they try to put like purple hat on the counter of human tragedy, it will be hard for me personally to not get on plane and do some actual property damage. It's time to push back. It's time to say that not everything should be purchased and sold. Not every crowd of people is there to be monetized. Some things just create value. And that value is captured by all of the people there equally. And it doesn't have to have some like large stakeholder sucking all that value into the value black hole. kind of do like moment where all of the sad comments on post are wrong. And that's just where we are. All those posts, all of them were wrong. can tell they're wrong because there was party few hours later across the country that seemed to quite kick ass. Why does Times Square New Year seem to kind of suck now? It's because it sucks. The only reason we're still doing it is because it feels like there's no other option. Why would want to watch the Kia ball be dropped? It used to just be ball, but it has to be Kia ball now. I'm going to be honest with you, even though this is little bit embarrassing, like when the camera panned to show that there actually was this huge mass of revelers at the billboard, actually got little weepy. And like got weepy because was kind of relieved and kind of amazed and and like just felt good about being person. It's beautiful. Like we make culture. And think that people can forget this because now so much culture is manufactured. But it's not real. Like we're all participants in that manufacturing. We get to decide what we make into culture and we know when that culture is being imposed on us. We have that internal compass for what is real and it is still operational. You could see it operating in Los Angeles at the Los Angeles Smoking Death Spillboard. Times Square New Year's is hollow. It's not like hollow like wooden box. It's hollow like an empty plastic milk jug. It is empty empty. And what do we do when our traditions are empty? What do we do when they aren't for us? What do we do when we feel like they have left us behind? Do we cast about listlessly lost inside of world that it doesn't feel like it IS FOR US? YEAH. YEAH, WE DO THAT. But as these spaces, both digital and physical, feel less and less like they belong to us, there is simply no way to stop us from finding new paths. We will crawl under the fences of the optimized world to find the ugly world because the ugly world is where we actually live. For moment, you stop looking at the screen. You stop looking at the stage and you look at each other like we look side to side. We author our own culture. This is unstoppable. It is inevitable. And when done in ways that bring people together and does not drive them apart, WILL ALWAYS LOVE IT. WILL LOVE IT SO MUCH. HAPPY NEW YEAR. May your year be as weird, as unauthorized, and as authentically yours as block party at smoking death billboard on Santa Monica Boulevard. Let's do connections. But first, this video is I'm kidding. That would be too much, wouldn't it? have been doing lot of advertising on this channel for the last Look, there's like two kinds of advertising here for those of you who stuck around. There's stuff where I'm advertising stuff that I'm doing like good store or focus friend or something and then there's stuff where I'm getting paid to advertise stuff. That second thing I've been doing bunch of because I'm trying to fund project without taking investment right now. And hopefully you'll hear about that project sometime in 2026. It's not going to be for everybody, but it's going to be for some folks, but I'm excited about it, but do not want to have the additional stakeholder of bunch of venture capitalists. So, think I've got enough money to self-fund it for year, but can definitely be wrong. So, if you see me doing more ads, it's either because like the money was just very good or feel really good about the sponsor. So, that's another reason. And like feel good about all the sponsors. Like people will give me hard time about sponsors sometimes and I'm like think that you're just too far stuck in the discourse to see that this is actually like good product. Maybe not for you, but for many people. But will say kind of plug here. first started writing this video as an intro for my brother and I's newsletter which is called We Here. And then was like this is too much. need to make this into whole freaking 20 minute long thing. But that newsletter does not have any advertising and it is just like me and John trading off having thoughts about the world like the thoughts that you have just heard. And the things that we promo are like videos from Complexely if we're ever going on tour. Like there there is promo in there but there's not advertising. But the main attractions of the newsletter are like some thoughts from me or John, series of curated cool things from the internet rather than like having to stumble across them in your feed and actually just sort of deliver them to you and like also cool weird stuff from people. There are some interactive elements. You can check it out. There's link in the description. It's called We're Here. All right. Now, connections. Party boat quarter squads. Clear balloon. Flush stuffed. Rich pack pad deep flat. Full straight digs. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. didn't see anything. full straight. Full house. Straight. Full straight. Quads. Is that thing? When you got when you got four of Is that called quads? Okay. Well, did at least find digs pad quarters. What else? What's the other one? Flat. Like place where you sleep. These are your pl This is place where you go to bed, but it's not house. It's non-house place where you go to bed. We're gonna coast on that one for little while. you're flush. You're stuffed. You're rich. You're full. Flush is like you have lot of money. Full isn't really like you have lot of money. My voice hurts from yelling about Los Angeles smoking billboard. Wads is weird. It does feel like it's what happens when you roll dice in certain situation. Stuffed crust pizza. Stuffed marshmallows. Stuffed deep dish pizza. Is this pizza thing? Stuffed deep. These are two ways pizza can be. It's pizza crust. Just things. No. No. No. That could be poker terms, but don't know cuz feel like it'd be full house, wouldn't it? It's like you don't just have full rich, deep like like full understanding of something. Rich, deep, and full. Rich, deep, full, and stuffed. don't love that. But that that feels like more than anything I've seen so far. So like this is this can't be right. But there's like party balloon, party boat, party pack, and party full. Party full is thing, right? That's like brand. That's that app that everybody uses now for parties. mean, it could be party or party and that would be hilarious and messed up. And then it would be flush, straight, quads, and what? Clear. Is that poker phrase? So it's not party fault. Good. And it's not Party Party. mean, maybe it is. It's Party Party thing. Now we're googling everybody. don't like to Google, but sometimes do. Party Party is film from 1983. don't think that that's it. don't know. don't know what else it is. Like full understanding. Stuffed is little weird there. So, rich understanding, deep understanding, full understanding. It's not stuffed understanding. clear understanding. Yeah, that's probably what it is. And then that leaves flush straight stuffed and quads. and then balloon. Still balloon pack boat party. mean, those all feel like party things, but like you can't PUT PARTY IN THE party category. I'll be very mad if party is in party category. And it's the 1983 film Party Party. I'm going have to go for it, you guys. I'm not feeling it. Balloon pack, Boat, Party. Frick. THAT'S ONE AWAY. THIS is my new rule. If don't get perfect puzzle, could do it in whatever order. So, now I'm going to rich, deep, clear, and full. Okay. well, that's not really how was was thinking of it, but guess that makes sense. And then pad, digs, quarters, and flat, right? Okay, that's the yellow. And then is it really like some kind of poker thing? don't know. Flush, straight, quads, and pack. Rest of these things don't feel very pokery at all. Is it boat? Can you have boat? flush, straight, quads, and boat. got boat. That's what you bet on your hand of poker is your boat. Balloon stuffed party balloon animal pack animal. Stuffed animal party animal. Frick. COULD HAVE HAD IT. MEAN, it's ridiculous to get the purple now. And then flustrate quads boat. What is this? No. just don't know enough about poker, you guys. don't know enough about poker. don't feel good about that. At least it was five out of five. Dang it. Well, at least there are good things in the world. like the Los Angeles smoking deaths billboard.