EXCLUSIVE: Nine Hacks to Enrich Your Life

Humans have a tendency to fuck things up for themselves. Drinking too much before a date. Doing too much coke before an expensive meal, and then not being able to eat anything, because you're a moron. Impatiently switching lines in the ePassport queue, then getting stuck behind someone who jams their passport into the machine every conceivable way except the right way, for what feels like your entire life lived twice, before they're shuttled off to the idiot queue.

Here at VICE UK, we want to help our readers avoid fucking everything up – to help enrich their lives, rather than ruin them. Considering there's an election coming up, on the 12th of December, there are a few specific things you could do that will allow you to do exactly that.

Check them out:

Do you know who is registered to vote? People who ask to speak to the manager because they've been served sweet potato fries instead of "normal" fries. Do you know who else is registered to vote? Your dickhead landlord who came round last Saturday morning – when you were very hungover and just trying to make a simple hash brown sandwich to self-soothe – to announce that, despite the fact he hasn't got around to any of the repairs he told you he'd do two months ago, he'll be increasing the monthly rent, thank you very much. Your boss is registered to vote. So is your old DT teacher who does the quite intense Brexit Facebook statuses.

Now, I don't know about you, but I wouldn't like to leave decisions about my life up to these people without getting to say what I think as well. So if I were you, I'd just fill out the registration.

– @hiyalauren

Register to vote because your landlord is registered to vote. Register to vote because our planet is burning, and because we spend more money on nuclear weapons than we do on obliterating school lunch debt. Register to vote because you can't remember a time when you didn't know what "Weapons of Mass Destruction" meant, or because you will never know what it's like to graduate from university not drowning in debt.

Register to vote because your finances are in a mess but the financial crisis wasn't your fault. Register to vote because you can't afford a house, but the housing crisis wasn’t your fault. Register to vote because hate crimes are on the rise but Brexit wasn't your fault.

Register to vote because George Osborne has nine jobs, despite claiming we were all in this together. Register to vote because Jacob Rees-Mogg claimed the residents of Grenfell were too stupid to escape their burning tower block.

Register to vote because Boris Johnson is hoping you don't.

– @dipofaloyin

No one at a festival wants to listen to you wang on about how miserable you are because it's pissing down and you're wearing a bin bag over a vest after snubbing all your mates' advice about packing wellies and a proper coat.

The same goes for the 13th of December, if the Tories are voted in for another five years of astonishing cruelty and inequality and you did absolutely fuck all to stop it. Fortunately, you can stop it very easily. All it takes is registering to vote. So if you haven't registered to vote: do it now. It takes less time than having a fag, boiling a kettle or taking a dump, and the benefits will be much longer-lasting.

Who knows, maybe one day you'll even be dumping in a properly ventilated bathroom in a rent-controlled flat, and not paying £600 pcm to shit in a cupboard. So do it now. You have until 11:59PM today, but do it now.

– @emmaggarland

In urging you to register to vote, I'm not going to sell you a sweet love story, or beg for your kinder and more altruistic side to come out, or speak to you in terms of petals and flowers and white fluffy clouds: no. You, like me, are a bastard, and you are drawn by the same two energies as I am: PETTINESS and REVENGE.

First, to pettiness: you do not get to complain about things with any sort of integrity if you don't register to vote, and I love complaining about things, and I don't intend to have that taken away from me (I have tried complaining about things without voting first, and it's a thin, lacklustre gravy: for the real sauce, you must underpin your complaint with the fact that you at least tried to do something).

So firstly, there is that. And then, more vitally, revenge: everyone you hate, everyone you have ever hated – except for the dead ones, but with them you have already won – is going to vote. If nothing else, you should vote to shit on their dinner. It does not matter about the country and it does not matter about the future and it does not matter about the environment and it does not matter about the banks: bring politics back down here, where it belongs, into the dark, dark mud, down here into the mess with me. Vote to ruin someone else's December 13th. There should be no greater motivation than that.

– @joelgolby

I hate people telling me what to do. But if you don't register to vote you'll not have a stake in changing anything that causes you stress and ill health on the daily. In the growing threat of climate change, how your wages stretch – or don't – to essentials, the quality of the food you eat, waiting times for your therapy sessions, the ever-growing homelessness crisis, that you can only visit your mum's twice a year because of the price of rail tickets, and that when you do get to her house the internet connection's shit. Spend literally seconds registering to vote and, all of a sudden, you do have stake. You've got no excuse, really, do you.

– @hannahrosewens

Don't you think life has become sort of a shit-show lately? And when I say lately, I mean for a few years now? Like that time you got an STI at the grand old age of 26 and had to sit in the waiting room at your local walk-in for nine hours because there were only three nurses? Or when you had to move back in with your mum because your flat – which has brown carpets and a bedroom that stinks of mould – is now apparently worth £800 a month? Or when it was so hot last summer – so hot that you slept with your feet dangling out the window at night, and then your plants died, and then the plant pots actually started melting?

You've probably heard there's a general election on the 12th of December (that's right, baby: just in time for Christmas). If you've heard there's a general election, then you've probably registered to vote. If for some reason you haven't done that yet, today is the final day you can do it. If you don't register to vote, you are legally never, ever allowed to moan about cuts to the NHS, soaring rent prices and gentrification, climate change and the fact the planet is dying. Oh, and also: people who vote are really hot. Register now.

– @daisythejones

'Why should I register to vote?' you wonder, warming your hands together in the cold, dingy bedroom you rent for 55 percent of your wage. You'd look it up online, but in the year 2030 you can't afford the weekly subscription for The Internet™ (property of Facebook), considering your salary hasn't risen with inflation in years. In a previous life you could have gone to the "library", but those are long gone; now, the British high street is just WeWorks, SoulCycles, Nandos and the one timeless stalwart, tattoo shops.

You look out onto the street, where homelessness never stopped rising after the Conservatives came to power, and wonder if there's anything you can do about it. If only you could remember what you read once about voting on a youth-focused website. Something about getting a voice? Something about being able to make a change for the better, and have a say in the country you live in? Something about how women and people of colour have been routinely denied their right to vote, and that not to vote would be disrespecting all the people who fought for it? Who knows. Better not linger on it too much. Back to the 50-hour work week!

- @RubyJLL

I grew up as the youngest of a gigantic family in a tiny village in the Midlands. For generations, my mom's side worked in the area as barmen, machine operators in mills or servants at the local court. Growing up, vague memories of waiting after school for my mom to pace onto the playground through a sea of grey and burgundy coats dressed in royal blue are what first come to mind. She was a nurse at the Alexandra Hospital. From school, she'd drive to the local post office to pick up our family allowance, then drop me off at youth club.

The reason I’m bringing this stuff up is, if I grew up there today, things would be very different. The family allowance doesn’t exist anymore; there's no funding for youth clubs; the wards she worked in and the hospital itself, where most the people I love were born or died, has long been obliterated. In the name of what? A political decision. Today, this government have made it impossible to grow up working class in a village. Our society has become much poorer, divided and miserable for it, and that has to change. Register to vote here and have your say.

- @Oobahs

"If you don't vote, you can't complain!"

"It doesn't matter who you vote for, but please register to vote and use your voice!"

All the clichés that go with encouraging people to vote are enough to make me want to spoil my ballot. Let's be clear: if you don't vote, you can still complain. If you do vote, it matters who you vote for, otherwise why would you bother?

Voting at general elections is just one form of political expression, and a limited one at that. There have been past elections where the choice has been so awful that refusing to give a mandate seemed like a reasonable thing to do (is Ed Miliband inscribing "controls on immigration" really the lesser of two evils, or just spineless, pathetic triangulating?). Apathy in the face of a system that disempowers people should not be a cause for contempt.

However, I think you should register to vote at this election, and vote to dropkick this rotten government in the balls and out of office. Almost a decade of Tory rule (the first five of which with Lib-Dem accomplices) has caused mass misery for working class people and ethnic minorities. Meanwhile, the dregs of society have been living it up: landlords, property developers, business owners (until Brexit's uncertainty), shoddy employers.

In response to the social crisis they have caused, the Conservatives are offering the deceitful mirage of getting Brexit "done", and some pennies from their table. Their promise to recruit 50,000 "more" nurses has been exposed as meaning they will repel 20,000 fewer than they would have. The "immigration" part of their manifesto panders to racist myths.

The danger of Boris Johnson with a mandate to govern is severe. But more severe is the heart attack I will have at the hilarity of a smug, born-to-rule Etonian having the smile wiped off his face in front of the entire country. Let me die happy.

- @simonchilds13