It was “Blue Monday” this week, a day which is, apparently, the most depressing of the year falling just after January 13th which is supposedly the coldest day of the year, although anyone standing in the garden with me in their bathrobe at 2 am last Thursday morning when the dog needed the toilet would almost certainly disagree.
There is a degree of fog around whether “Blue Monday” was conceived as a result of some rather dubious research by psychologist Cliff Arnall, or whether it was a marketing idea dreamed up by the travel industry to get people booking holidays having asked Arnall to come up with a formula that made it look credible.
Anyway, it’s always seemed an utterly pointless idea to designate a day as one of low mood when we’re all perfectly capable of achieving low mood without encouragement.
Perversely, I like the winter but I have been thinking this week about the extent to which we think the things we think because we already decided that we believe them, whether or not they happen to be true.
Our “confirmation bias” means that, rather than waiting for the evidence and drawing a conclusion, we start with a conclusion based on what we already believe about ourselves and the world, and then make the evidence fit it.
I’ve not been well this week and, to be frank, I’m still feeling decidedly fragile.
Unsurprising though was the moment, as my illness peaked, when I started to wonder if I was dying.
Perhaps it was the fever, or maybe I did really feel I was on the way out, but does everyone in the midst of a particularly unpleasant viral illness imagine they are about to expire or is it just what I have come to believe?
Later in the week, I stirred myself sufficiently to give a 30 minutes talk on procrastination.
The host had been kind enough to say I could record it when I felt better and that they’d then send it around to everyone who had registered.
“How many have signed up?” I asked.
“About 450,” they told me.
That was it. I couldn’t let my audience down. I must push through the nausea and low energy to deliver a performance of the highest quality.
Ten minutes in, running on pure adrenaline, I start to hear noises.
First, it’s a couple of coughs and some muttering. “Someone’s forgotten to put themselves on mute,” I think to myself.
Then I hear someone chuckle after I make a statement that wasn’t intended to be funny.
Then, after another of my best lines, I hear an enormous burp echoing across the airwaves.
That’s it. It’s obviously an insurgent who has no interest in how to deal with their procrastination interested in nothing more than wrecking my talk and ridiculing me in the process.
“Why isn’t security tighter for these events?” I find myself thinking, now significantly rattled and beginning to doubt the whole premise of my presentation that had, a few minutes ago, seemed like an excellent alternative take on improving productivity.
The messages in the “chat”, that I can’t read because I’m in the middle of a presentation, are rattling up. Thirty, forty, now over sixty. Is everyone making a mockery of me?
A voice out of the ether. It is the host.
“Hugo, would you mind putting yourself on mute we’re hearing a lot of noise from your mic?”
In the chat afterward, I read through the comments. Countless people asking Hugo to go on mute because they can’t concentrate on what I’m saying, and Hugo is mortified that he should have made such a show of himself.
It’s rare for me to feel blue in January, whatever the weather because that’s just not the way I see myself. Belch in the middle of my presentation though, and I’ll slip into a pit of self-doubt.
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