Many believe that happiness is relative, and by extension, so is sadness. We can't pretend to be happy all the time, and if we're always sad, perhaps we should examine that more closely. But 2016 gave us many reasons to feel sadness, and 2017 doesn't seem like a merciful year. Some time ago, Dr. Cliff Arnall of Cardiff University supposedly created a formula to detect the saddest day of the year. If we take it seriously and apply it with our current data... it's today.
What Makes Us Sad?
The idea is not just about imagining personal tragedies. Today, things that have a minor individual impact can drag down our spirits when they accumulate. Personally, I can speak of certain health issues that I can't resolve and the lack of resources to carry out some projects. However, last year was responsible for a blanket of generalized sadness. The departure of several artists, actors, actresses, and athletes symbolized a kind of "end of happiness", or at least the end of the era that made us happy. Scientists have tried to quantify happiness on more than one occasion, and one of the most cited works is "Blue Monday", the saddest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere.
The Blue Monday Formula
The Blue Monday formula is associated with a doctor named Cliff Arnall, who worked for a time at Cardiff University. The result of the formula is a kind of "depression score", and it's calculated as follows: From our general debt we subtract our monthly salary, and the obtained value is added to the state of the weather. That sum is multiplied by the time that has passed since Christmas raised to the time elapsed since we failed our New Year's resolutions. That general result is then divided by the multiplication between the levels of motivation, and the feeling of "taking action" to change things. I'm afraid there are no reference units, but since Blue Monday exists, it usually points to the third Monday of January as the saddest day of the year.
A Pseudoscientific Tradition?
Of course, all this is pseudoscience. Cardiff University had to announce that Dr. Arnall spent very little time at that institution, and if we trace Blue Monday to its origins, we discover it was first used in the press release of a travel agency. In other words, the most likely thing is that Dr. Arnall received some money for his name to appear in the publication.
Now, Monday is interpreted as a sad day with or without equations. It's the return to routine, to weekly problems, chaos. Maybe the Northern Hemisphere has extra reasons to feel sad, with Brexit and the arrival of president-elect Donald Trump at the helm... but as we indicated above, sadness is relative, and there are many people celebrating both events. In summary: If you're happy, enjoy. And if not, don't worry too much, but if it lasts, don't let sadness govern you.
