All the Shit We Need to Leave in 2018

Big year, this, wasn't it. A lot of stuff happened – I'm sure you remember some of it. Some good, some bad, some just wildly shit. Here's everything from that last category that needs to be left in 2018 and never thought or spoken of again.

All my enemies, obviously. I hope nobody is using this list to advocate for leaving behind things for the wider good. "Oh, leave straws in 2018!" – no. "Maybe we should leave behind famine and war" – unrealistic, no. Let's leave behind everyone who has ever wronged me, personally, plus a scattershot list of journalists and media commentators who have one way or another irritated me in a way that tipped over from "light, fun hate" into "full, actual hate". Leave behind Ben who cost me my entire deposit when I moved out of a house in 2015! I hope you die, mate! And if you don't die, I'm coming to kill you! 2019, bitch!

@joelgolby

Growing up, one of the most anxiety-inducing parts of the internet for me was chain mail. I'd lay in bed unable to sleep because I was worried that a murderous Mickey Mouse would come for me in the night. I thought this might end with age, but it's 2018 and I'm still receiving chain mail. You, like me, may have older relatives who have recently started taking full advantage of the "forwarding" feature they've added to WhatsApp. In my case, that means I'm inundated with Bible quotes, memes from three years ago and fake news reports "from the police". While there's no fear of being killed by a cartoon anymore, I do have to put up with my mum and my aunt asking me why I've stopped replying to their messages. So for the sake of my family, please, get rid.

@nanasbaah

Everyone thinks the same – or, rather, feels they should think like everyone else, based largely on fear. Thanks to cancel culture, everyone waits for everyone else to form the "right" liberal stance on the latest news story or Celebrity Who's Said A Dumb Thing. I'd rather see online disagreements based on genuine differences like the good old days (Twitter, c. 2013) rather than misguided outrage when someone's opinion varies from your own ever so slightly. We've gotten lazy in reaching our own autonomous opinions, instead relying on the "woke" position to surface.

@hannahrosewens

It has become extremely evident over the course of 2018 that the memes are all we've got. The environment is dying and the country is politically – but also just very fundamentally? – clapped. The memes are the only thing left. So why, then, do we insist on insulting this great and noble form with useless, phoned-in nonsense like "he's not your man" and "don’t say it" when we are capable of so much more? We of "absolute unit", we of photos of Ben Affleck smoking, we of that class one with the butterfly. Our memes have become the measure of ourselves, and as soon as we allow them to slip to the level of "Video killed the radio star" (with the clear exception of the transcendent Princess Diana one), we are proving that we are unworthy of the medium. They can take our dignity, but they cannot take our Johnny Yes Papa. I will not allow it.

@hiyalauren

For all the controversy famous people create for themselves – usually by either assaulting someone or weighing in on an issue that did not require their input – has anyone issued a half-decent apology for anything ever? Besides Samantha Bee gracefully conceding to crossing the line in some people's eyes after calling Ivanka Trump a "feckless cunt", has anyone said anything that has warranted a simple "yeah, fair play"?

The majority of public apologies tend to come from female celebrities who inadvertently said something fatphobic in an interview, or repeat offenders who have made so little progress in the way of "not offending people" that everyone just needs to stop paying attention to them immediately. Meanwhile, anyone with anything of genuine importance to cop to seems to slink off relatively unscathed while everyone on Twitter argues about whatever Lena Dunham didn't need to say this time. So let's just do away with them. The only people I want to hear public apologies from next year are train companies, the 1 percent and whoever gave me chlamydia. Everyone else: stop doing and saying things that are bad. Being quiet is a big mood for 2019.

@emmagarland

Obviously work needs to be destroyed to save humanity and the planet, but in the meantime can someone tell me what the point of being in an office is? They’re just bougie work camps with Nespresso machines. Sure, sometimes you have meet up to plan things and begrudgingly talk to your colleagues or whatever, but you could do that in a café. The rest of the time you could perfectly happily be doing your work remotely and away from the people you've been randomly allotted to spend most of your waking hours with.

Readers who still talk to people face-to-face at work may fear that they have something to lose. They obviously don't have Slack, which is to real human interaction at work what MSM messenger was to talking to girls IRL in my teenage years. If we’re going to communicate electronically, we might as well do it from the sofa – plus, not commuting might mean you have more time to hang out with your actual friends.

@simonchilds13

It is always the same. I wake up one morning a fairly committed vegan, and then less than one second on social media tells me that PETA has pulled its usual "discrimination against animals is as bad as racism and homophobia" bollocks, and I am immediately half ready to buy out Canada Goose with a double cheeseburger in each hand. I never understand why organisations like this think they will persuade people of their cause with patently ridiculous (and, frankly, unfunny, which is even worse) shit like "bringing home the bagels". It is maddening and patronising and, ultimately, it undermines vegetarianism by making us look like a load of preachy, ill-informed arseholes, when actually we just wanna get on with our days and maybe, like, eat some crisps. And they do this probably about three times a year! Maybe more! Despite causing a shitstorm literally every time! In the bin with you, PETA. Go on. Fuck off.

@hiyalauren

No further explanation at this time.

@joelgolby

Fortnite Battle Royale is a game for 12-year-olds that I play with a focus and dedication you might assign to an Olympic athlete or a silence-vow monk. I am also extremely shit at it and I cannot fucking believe how many hours of pure bullshit in my life I have poured into this nonsense. My tiny baby cousin wins about two games a week and texts me each time it happens, and I still do not have the fast-twitch reactions to adequately build a ramp half of the time. It feels like Fortnite is destined to define 2018. Season seven of the quasi-story/Battle Pass has just started, and once again the map of the world has morphed and changed, and this will continue deep into 2019, but it'll never feel quite like the cultural seismic wave it felt like this year; it will become a background-noise multi-million dollar-generating free download, compared to a front-and-centre one – but fucking hell I just want the hours of my life back. I just want the space in my brain back! I want my Instagram Explore feed to stop being silent clips of people sniping! I wish I did not know what Lucky Landing was, or who Ninja is, or what a llama means in the context of the game! I wish I'd read any books this year!

@joelgolby

Less so the act of ghosting itself – because although it isn't the nicest thing to do, it's often the only thing you can do, unless you're happy telling people that you hope to never have to interact with them again – and more the backlash against it.

This year, everyone got very upset about ghosting. Dating apps have started cracking down on it, prompting you if you take more than a couple of days to respond. People's reactions to ghosting have been wild as well. Earlier this year, a woman was ghosted, and instead of just sending a pass-agg text or forgetting about it like the rest of us, she sent a verbal CV to her ghoster and demanded another date.

What I'm saying is: if you go to that sort of effort or do any sort of admin at all after a date, it's clear why you were ghosted in the first place.

@nanasbaah

Elon Musk has had quite a year. He hoofed a car into space. He sold 20,000 branded flamethrowers. He tanked shares of his own company after stating that he was taking Tesla private for $420 a share in an attempt to make his girlfriend, who is Grimes, laugh. He called a heroic cave diver a nonce, tweeted about selling branded "thigh high socks with pockets for lipliner & cards" while apparently on acid, with Azealia Banks trapped somewhere on his estate, and pretended not to know what weed was, before honking a fat spliff on Joe Rogan in an Occupy shirt.

2018 was, above all else, the year of unfathomably rich people getting away with stuff. And while it would be remiss not to mention that someone with a net worth of $22.1 billion tweeting about booty shorts in the dead of night hasn't brought me some joy, this man is insane. He is a sentient episode of Workaholics. A highly upvoted post on r/AWLIAS. A man with the grand vision of a home counties dealer and the money to make it happen, being both upheld and destroyed by his own cult of personality. For his own sake, we cannot allow this to continue beyond January.

@emmagarland

A niche one, yes, but no less important than any of the others. Scroll down any band's Twitter page and you’ll see loads of retweets of spritely teen fans sharing their fresh new ink. These innocent babes have popped down to whatever studio will do them without a passport and got some trite lyrics or dodgy band logo done, bleeding lines and gauche colours everywhere. Sometimes the artist will even tweet out: "You guys! Any of you got some lyric tattoos? Show us and we’ll share! Means so much to us!" Two years later, the band gets found sexting underage girls or videoed saying something homophobic, and kids are left with a permanent homage to a nonce or a homophobe.

I respect other adults with bad tattoos. I've got teenage tattoos that'd make you cringe, so I'd better. They add character, in a way. But in another way: absolute embarrassment. Nonsense scribbles, a partial decimation of my reasonably hot body, terrible decision. Shite, shite, shite. Bad musicians, stop encouraging your fans to get marginally worse tattoos.

@hannahrosewens

2016 is the first year that I can remember the present being referred to as a sort of in-joke. People would say "that's so 2016" when another celebrity died, or "fuck 2016" when Donald Trump got elected. This followed social media posts from the end of 2015 that looked forward to "leaving this trash-fire year in the fucking dust".

This is a half-joking nostalgia for a more benign recent reality to which we will shortly return. David Bowie was still alive in 2015, after all. But it's dangerous fatalism.

There wasn't a year in recent memory when things didn't suck – when you wouldn’t have to waste your life in a mind-numbing job in order to access the basic necessities. If you want a year when things were generally less terrible for some people, that would be 2007, before the financial crash, when at least there were fewer landlords greasing their palms and the Tories hadn't further degraded the social safety net. And even that relative comfort was built on a system that exploited everyone and was teetering on the edge of its own destruction.

The whole idea that we can leave things in 2018 is very 2016. Our crappy reality reproduces itself in a cycle which needs to be broken by concerted action, not wished away with the welcoming of a new year.

@simonchilds13