Am I the only person that had never heard of Blue Monday until this year? When my Twitter stream was clogged up with a flurry of articles and quips on the subject a few days ago, it certainly seemed that way. A quick Google search revealed that the third Monday of each January is supposedly the most depressing day of the year – and everybody was certainly talking about it – but I couldn’t help but question the validity of such a bold claim.
Now, we’ve all heard the stats: January is the month with the most break-ups. It’s the month of failed resolutions, post-holiday slump, slow business. For most youth, it also brings the much-dreaded period of midterms or final exams. There are many reasons why many people may be feeling “down” this time of year. However, is there any real reason to point to one day and name it as the most depressing?
The term “Blue Monday” was coined in 2005 by a holiday company known as Sky Travel, and the fact that it was originally used in a press release should probably be the first red flag. The company claimed to have calculated this date by means of an equation, one that included factors such as “time since Christmas”, “weather conditions”, “motivational levels”, and “time since failing new year’s resolutions”. First of all — how is it even possible to determine “motivation levels” of an entire population? How can that be extrapolated to compare to motivation during the rest of the year? How you account for various other factors that will influence your results from one year to the next? To say the least, it’s puzzling.
It turns out that I’m not the only skeptic – since its inception, both the term “Blue Monday” and the logic behind it have been largely criticised. In fact, many people call it pseudoscience. So why do we continue to flaunt it, even after a decade? It turns out that somewhere along the way, people have become rather attracted to the idea of antagonising one day of the year and complaining about it with what is viewed as complete justification. It’s a frightening example of how much power a PR campaign has to influence culture.
Maybe January 19th, 2015 was a great day for you. Maybe it wasn’t. Just remember that there’s no correlation between the location of the earth in its orbit and how likely you are to feel “depressed” — true clinical depression is a complex condition that is affected by countless factors; internal, external, genetic and otherwise. It’s not something that can be accurately calculated for an entire population with one nonsensical formula.
Happy 10th birthday, Blue Monday. Hopefully we’ll have gained some rationality by your 11th.