Writing about "the most depressing day of the year" an hour before it ends is, of course, a special level of strategic planning. But let's say I was just collecting data.
They say the third Monday of January is the day when all factors — from miserable weather to post-holiday debt realization — converge at the point of maximum gloom.
The whole concept rests on a formula that psychologist Cliff Arnall derived in 2005. Where W is weather, D is debt, d is salary... You get the idea.
From a data science perspective — complete nonsense. The variables are incommensurable, the coefficients are pulled from thin air, and the formula was created on commission from a travel company to sell vacation packages to sad Britons.
In essence, Blue Monday was the first successful hallucination in history — except it was generated not by ChatGPT, but by marketers.
But there's good news. The only real Blue Monday that matters is the New Order track. While marketers were inventing sadness formulas, these guys in 1983 were trying to get their synthesizers to work in sync. And they ended up recording the best-selling 12-inch single in history.
The irony is that their famous beat, which sounds like a perfectly working machine, was born from chaos. They soldered their own sequencer because factory ones didn't suit them, and spent a long time trying to make it play on time.
Simple conclusion: if you felt sad today — it's a bug in the marketing matrix. And if you're just tired — play some New Order. Their drum machine also suffered a bit, but ended up making history.