BLUE MONDAY
The mood of people knows ups and downs, but Monday, January 16 will hit the bottom: tradition wants it to be Blue Monday, the saddest day of the year.
It does not matter that the claim has poor scientific soundness and has worked mainly as a publicity stunt. On balance, it’s a recurrence that keeps people talking about themselves.
It all starts in the early 2000s thanks to the contribution of Cliff Arnall, psychologist of the University of Cardiff.
One day Arnall is seduced by the idea that there may be a particularly difficult day for the mood of the people. He thinks about it, formulates hypothesis, and eventually comes to an equation.
One of the factors examined is the weather, with particular attention to the colder temperatures and therefore less "friendly" to people. Arnall adds to the calculation the return to work commitments after the Christmas and New Year holidays. Finally, he adds a comment: on the occasion of 25 and 31 December we tend to make good resolutions for the new year and to formulate them with a certain lightness, exaggerating intentions.
Time a couple of weeks and the knots come to a head, revealing the illusory plans put in place. In short, the peak of these three elements is reached on the third Monday of January.
When Cliff Arnall publishes the results of his research, the academic world looks at him like crazy.
The University of Cardiff officially dissociates itself and defines its equation as an example of pseudoscience: a term that indicates practices that claim to be scientific when in reality they violate the requirements necessary for an objective, reliable and verifiable knowledge of the world.
I mean, the idea of Blue Monday is nice, but it’s not solid.
