Ahh, it’s the end of 2015! And, as is the custom at this time of year, we remark to each other: “Oh, my Gaaaawd! I can’t believe the year’s almost over, it just went by so fast! ” LIES! Years go by slowly. Observe:

Waiting for the elevator to arrive, the queue at the coffee shop, for the office printer to warm up, the gif to load on your phone, A REPLY TO THAT RISKY TEXT YOU SENT, ‘Your order will arrive in 4-5 business days’, ‘video buffering,’ the five seconds before you can hit ‘skip’ on YouTube videos, for the client to join the conference call, red lights, ad breaks, all flights ever, for inspiration to strike, for the waiter to notice your pleading, starving eyes, and for your abs to show through. Dammit, abs! Why won’t you come out already? You’re a coward, abs!

Time always passes slowly, especially with extended family over Christmas. So…. what did actually happen over this enormous stretch of time that we call 2015? Because I have no real short-term memory, I had to ask the Google, and here is what it had to say by way of their annual “most searched” list:

Interestingly, those who work in digital media, advertising or own a Google Adwords account, all know that all these annual “most searched” lists do not reflect the actual most searched. Oh, my no! Truth is, Google doesn’t release the real list (nor can it be found anywhere) because I assume it highlights how the human race is as mundane as we are perverted. What Google releases each year is noticeable news-related spikes in activity.

To illustrate, I added all the above along with a bunch of other words I thought would get high search volumes such as “cat”, “dog”, “minions”, “sex”, “Facebook”, “Google”, “Porn” and famed popcorn magnate, “Orville Redenbacher” into Google’s keyword planner to see what was more popular over the course of 2015:

“Facebook” is waaaaaay more popular than the official top ten combined. Lamar Odom only generated 0.1% of the search volume Facebook generated. If you remove “Facebook” and “Google” (the second most searched) from my list on the assumption it’s just people navigating to the home page of either, then “porn” was waaaaaay more popular the official top ten combined. Lamar accounted for just 3% of the volume of porn. And that’s just the word “porn”, not the category. Think what would happen if you added in all the variations of and related keywords. In other news, “Minions” were twice as popular as Caitlyn Jenner.

*Aside* I work in online media, and a part of the job is recreating the client’s ‘target audience’ as a series of online behaviours to make advertising recommendations. It doesn’t matter what combination of age, gender, or household income you input into the system if you forget to untick the “include adult content” box, as it always comes back with the porn. (“Well, sir, madam, we ran the numbers and we found… that your customers like social media and *mumbles*… Like, a lot.“)

But that’s what we get for secretly living in a shame-based theocracy; denial. By all means continue to perpetuate the myth that the internet is about cats just because they get more search traffic than Orville Redenbacher.

So which version of 2015 do we want to remember? The one with the boobs or the one with two stories related to the Kardashians? I was going to go with Wikipedia’s notable events of 2015, but it’s mostly notable massacares, plane crashes and earthquakes. My God. At a macro level this year sucked!

So maybe let’s ignore all that and think about all the little things – the micro level – that only affect you and those nearest to you. For me, I’m reflecting on having my first job that I really adore, getting promoted in that same job, finally starting a blog after enduring half a decade of people telling me that I should start a blog, thus putting me on the way to become one of those internet billionaires I’ve been hearing about, a bunny moved into my house

and a human girl also moved into my house. Like, on purpose and everything! Who would have thought that all this could happen to me; a white-looking male in a wealthy western nation? Hashtag yay. Hashtag me.

So as the clock counts down the final 10 seconds of 2015 at whatever NYE house party you to happen to be at, remember to reflect on all the good things you have, the people you love and who love you back. And then launch into a bellowing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ – the great New Year’s folk song by the great Scot, Robert Burns, which loosely translates to “Sorry for spilling wine on your rug, good inn keeper.”

In the next episode! “Predictions for 2016: Fire. That is all.”