I'm Boycotting Blue Monday: Who's In?

Being told it's the most miserable day of the year - oh, what joy

Nearly every January we’re reminded that 'Blue Monday' is about to roll around —

— the third Monday of the month is (allegedly!) the most depressing day of the year. For 2025, it's worth making a note in your diaries that Blue Monday will fall on 20th January 2025. Next Monday, in other words.

SCRATCH THAT…!

(Cue sounds of a car coming to a screeching halt. Or a needle scraping off a playing record.) What I meant to say was, I CALL BULLSHIT. I know I’m drawing attention to its attention-seeking self, like a Twitter troll on a rampage, but seriously — forget all this ‘most depressing day of the year’ nonsense.

Who wants to be told they’re going to be miserable?

(Going off on a slight tangent here, but while writing this I discovered a way to describe ‘attention-seeking’ on the thesaurus I use — the very fabulous wordhippo.com which I highly recommend for writers — I typed it in and one of the context suggestions was “Showing low self-esteem and needing approval from others to validate one's life”. How perfectly does that describe internet trolls? Take that, Katie Hopkins, you lousy garbage gremlin.)

Anyway, I digress.

Southern Hemisphere readers: I will admit I’m envious of you being in the middle of summer. Since the longest day here in the Northern Hemisphere (just before Christmas), I’ve been obsessively checking the sunset time every day, making a mental note of how much longer the day is from one day to the next. It’s no secret I don’t ‘do’ winter. You can keep your pumpkin spice and falling leaves and =horror of horrors= snow. Without looking, I think the official sunset time for South West England here should be… 16:29 today? (There’s no sun — as if, lol! — so I can’t exactly cheat by looking out the window.)

I’ve checked: it’s 16:33.

(That’s actually way out for me and my daylight-obsessive self. Must do better.)

By Monday (the blue one), sunset will be 16:44 (isn’t THIS interesting reading?!), and so if sunset is roughly eleven minutes later every week, then by the end of February it should be about…

…one hour and a bit later, so let’s say 17:55, or five to six. Then the clocks change at the end of March, so only another four and a half-ish weeks and you can add the hour we add for a month plus the daylight-saving hour and BOOM IT’S TIME FOR G&Ts ON THE DECK IN THE GARDEN BECAUSE THE SUN WON’T SET TILL EIGHT.

Still with me?

Blue Monday is, they say, the worst day of the year because it’s when:

• The weather is bad

• Debt level is high

• Christmas is long-gone

• New Year's resolutions have been broken

• Motivational levels are low

I’m not exactly sure, but I reckon your eyes are rolling as much as mine.

Truthfully, we should just agree to be thankful that there’ll be only…

Twenty-five days till Valentine’s Day!

Sixty-nine days till Mother’s Day!

Three months till Easter Sunday!

— in other words, not long till advertisers ram yet more reasons to spend money unnecessarily down our throats. What unbridled joy!

Sarcasm aside (can you tell we don’t do 14th Feb or Mother’s Day in our house…), I guess what I’m saying is, DON’T BUY INTO BLUE MONDAY.

Don’t let advertisers or marketers tell you to be miserable (if I see just ONE email from a brand talking about buying stuff I don’t need from them because, You know, Blue Monday, then bollocks to them, I’ll unsubscribe and never have to think abut their wares again). There’s enough misery going on in the world right now, so I guess what I’m saying is: let’s reclaim the third Monday in January every year and cheer the hell up in whatever tiny way we can.

I’m making anti-Blue Monday plans. I think I’ll dye my hair pink (again). I’ll watch Cunk on Life (but not while I’m eating because I always end up choking from laughing too much at anything involving Philomena Cunk). I’ll wear orange or pink or red or yellow — or maybe all of them all at once. I might rearrange stuff in the house and move furniture or hang pictures or spray paint some ornaments neon pink… because Blue Monday.

Interesting fact: Blue Monday was ‘calculated’ with an equation, where W = weather, D = debt, d = monthly salary, T = time since Christmas, Q = time since the failure of New Year's resolutions, M = low motivational levels, and Na = the feeling of a need to take action:

What in the Good Will Hunting is THAT all about?

And if the absurdity of the existence of a literal equation that calculates happiness (or lack of) doesn’t make you laugh, then can I recommend Philomena Cunk anyway…?

Thanks for reading my rantings — that’s the third week in a row where I’ve ranted about happiness and/or sadness (or both). I’m getting good at moaning. Just slap my thigh and call me Victor Meldrew.

Next week? I might discuss changing my online name and ask what you’d like reading about here, as it might be time to haul my blog’s ass out of the doldrums and get it settled in with the good people of Substack once and for all…

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P.S. It is said that roughly twenty years ago, a press release commissioned (commissioned?!) by Wall's Ice Cream calculated the happiest day of the year to be the day closest to Midsummer in the Northern Hemisphere (21st to 24th June). I mean, no shit, Sherlock: I could have told them that, FFS. And I’d have accepted payment in ice cream, no need for any friggin’ research, thanks very much.