Blue Monday is nonsense. Here are three reasons to be cheerful

Take one look at the formula used to predict ‘the most depressing day of the year’ and it falls apart pretty quickly

Noooooooooo!! We’re not even through the first month of 2020 and we’re already hitting the most depressing day of the year. I mean, talk about don’t start as you mean to go on.

And no, I’m not talking about Brexit, though surely that would trump this, or at the very least be a close contender. This is nothing to do with Megxit either. (Yay! A comment piece with no mention of Megxit. Well, errr, nearly. Doh!). And to all you New Order fans out there, this has nothing to with the group’s rather fantastic but gloomy track of the same name.

So anyway, I’ll put you out of your misery, or rather dump you straight in it... if you hadn’t already guessed, coming up is Blue Monday, the third Monday of the year – a day that in 2005 a certain Dr Cliff Arnall (who? Exactly!) calculated to be the most depressing day of the year. He did it using the following formula:

[W + (D-d)] x T^Q
—————————
M x N_a

W = weather
D= monthly salary
d = debt
T = time since Christmas
Q = time since failing our new year resolutions
M = low motivational levels
N_a = the feeling of a need to take action

Being a mathematician myself – well, to A-level standard at least – I have found many flaws with Arnall’s equation, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to pick it apart, does it?

For a start, how can a formula generate a number that will always be the third Monday of the year? The day itself falls on different dates year to year. Motivation levels differ person to person, as does the time since failing new year resolutions.

Some people haven’t failed yet, in which case T^Q = 0 and the whole answer is 0. Unless T is then a negative calculated on when you will fail, but that’s an unknown. All very pessimistic. Admittedly I’ve already failed mine; I’m no longer a vegan thanks to Burger King, but that’s a whole other story that you can read in last week’s column.

Maybe I’ve misunderstood. Maybe it’s an average calculated over lots of different people, or better still, maybe it’s just a clever marketing ploy, like all the other national days that have sprung up out of nowhere in our calendar. Why am I even entertaining this rubbish pseudoscientific equation?

Come on!!! 2020, we’re just at the beginning... So time for the antidote. Here’s some reasons to be cheerful pre-Brexit and pre-planetary extinction this Blue Monday.

1. Blue Monday is nonsense... hooray!!!

It was just a marketing ploy all along, cooked up by a company called Skytravel so that we’d all buy holidays from them to get into more debt – I mean, beat the blues. Even Dr Cliff refutes it now that Skytravel are no longer paying him – I mean, now he’s realised it’s rubbish.

It’s just as well as mental health groups asserted the whole concept to be a bit irresponsible with respect to those suffering from depression and other related conditions, something particularly embarrassing considering Arnall is a life coach.

So if you want some cheerier days to celebrate, today is Winnie the Pooh day, traditionally celebrated on AA Milne’s birthday with picnics featuring honey on the menu. Or on 21 January itself, how about Brew Monday, thought up by the Samaritans? It’s a day on which to reach out and have a cuppa with someone who’s lonely (or maybe just down in the dumps at the thought of Blue Monday).

2. Climate hope

If you’re fearing impending climate Armageddon, here’s some exciting news. Microbe food production is being developed in laboratories as we speak, and will bring about a food revolution.

You see, the thing about us humans is we overcomplicate things. To eat, our food manufacturing processes work on a huge scale, clearing land, rearing livestock, killing it, packaging it. Go big, only to shrink it all back down to small enough to shove in our mouths. Similarly, with crop production, we go large to eat small. It all needs a vast amount of land and water.

Enter microbe food production, potential saviour of planet Earth. By fermenting tiny single-cell organisms we will be able to synthesise all manner of foodstuffs in the future, everything from pasta to eggs, fish and meat. Small tweaks in the process will enable production of different proteins used to replicate food we already eat.

Keeping it small – as the brewing is essentially done in vats – means using a fraction of the water and land that agriculture currently uses. And get this: it can also be done using solar power in the desert. Win-win.

3. Brexit’s silver lining

So that’s the planet sorted. Now, if you’re dreading Brexit, look on the bright side and remember we’ll at least see the back of the Brexit Party’s dreadful MEPs.

This week saw their last day in Strasbourg, and in less than two weeks they’ll be redundant. No more turning their backs on the EU’s anthem, no more of their awful rhetoric and no more of their smug faces. On 31 January we’ll formally exit the EU, and then we can go back to being divided on more fun things – like in 2015, when we were all up in arms over whether that dress was white and gold or black and blue.