Look on the bright side. For students of the asinine, Blue Monday 2010 has a lot to offer.
1. There are two Blue Mondays this year. Excitingly, some press releases I’ve seen quote 18 January, some say it’s a week later, on 25 January. This could be a demonstration of how the scientific method means our knowledge advances in small steps; its conclusions should not be taken as revealed truth; they are merely suppositions based on the best evidence that we have today. We should welcome uncertainty as a stimulus for debate and further research.
On the other hand, it might just mean that one PR company timed its campaign a week earlier than the other, and the equation is so vague and subjective that you can fit it to more or less any day of the year if you try hard enough.
2. Who should we put in the stocks and throw fruit at? Dr Ben Goldacre did the real research on this when the equation first showed up. Blue Monday was invented by Porter Novelli (“We have the right conversations with the right people at the right time”) in 2006 for Sky Travel. The idea of the equation was shopped around academics, offering them money if they claimed to have derived it. Dr Cliff Arnall, at the time a temporary lecturer at the Cardiff University Centre for Lifelong Learning, grabbed the opportunity and made some good publicity for himself – though his former employers seem less delighted. He has no genuine insight into the day when you are least happy, but at least he has “Dr” in front of his name. If we could only get a picture of him in a white coat, then Blue Monday would be so much more credible.
3. How do we give depression more pizazz? The question has been asked in a thousand marketing brainstorms. One genuinely sad aspect of Blue Monday every year is the miserable attempt by some PR companies to inject pep into unhappiness by telling us to buy something. Recall that the whole sham was set up to sell holidays; other people use it as an excuse to bung out a lightweight “why not buy this?” press release – just as long as they don’t get too hung up on the depression thing. For example: “‘Blue Monday is believed to highlight a more general temporary gloominess for a usually more balanced and positive population, says Caroline Carr, hypnotherapist and author of the just published Living with Depression.”
General temporary gloominess: translation - ”as a therapist, how can I describe this fictional marketing construct as if it was real so that I can plug my book without overstepping any kind of regulatory guidelines.”
Journalists trot out exactly the same Blue Monday feature every year, partly because the end of January is pretty barren if you’re looking to fill the inside of a local paper. You did detox diets, giving up smoking and and gym membership in week one, and it’s not time to do “Put some spark into your love life with these Valentines Day ideas” yet. Those lifestyle pages don’t fill themselves, you know.
I don’t like to miss out on a misery party and so I feel the urge to explain my personal general temporary gloominess with an equation. After as much as 30 seconds of careful research, I came up with this:
Where D is how depressed I will feel
Ci is the number of column inches given to article Ai where i=1, 2, 3, …
E is the number of times they mention that stupid equation
and delta is the number of days that this story lasts
If you want to use my formula in a meaningless and generic story about how journalism bloggers get sad when they read press releases about Blue Monday, please quote me as “Dr Tim Phillips, an expert in disappointment at the Polytechnic of Cynicism”.