Today is supposedly Blue Monday. Sixteen years ago, a travel agency published a press release claiming that the third Monday in January is the most depressing day of the year. The idea is superficially plausible. It’s mid-January. It’s cold. You’re skint after Christmas. You’re back at work after the weekend. There are worse candidates for the most miserable day of the year. But as a scientific claim, it was swiftly debunked and the academic responsible for it has since disowned it. It lives on as a way of filling space in newspapers and is probably most famous for being untrue. If it weren’t for the ‘I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that’ crowd popping up once a year to tell us that’s it’s pseudo-science, Blue Monday might have been forgotten by now.
The original research, such as it was, did not attempt to measure happiness, but there is a whole field of happiness economics that tries to do just that.
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