If you really want to beat Blue Monday, it's time to go on strike

The most depressing day of the year is here – or is it? Blue Monday, dreamed up by a travel company to flog holidays, has been thoroughly debunked. Back in 2009, Ben Goldacre called it "bulls**t presented as fact”, thoroughly demolishing the "science" behind the concept in the process.

Nearly a decade later, we’re still reading about how to “beat” it: Bustle has a list of tips including a “long hot bath”, while the Mirror suggests watching “uplifting Disney classics”.

On they go publishing and on we go reading. Why? It's simple. Blue Monday is about something 99 per cent of us know: It's about how crap our jobs are.

It's no wonder we're all hoping this can be solved by a hot bath and an afternoon viewing of Brave. The ONS reports that the number of workers on zero hour contracts rose by 20 per cent last year. Citizens Advice says that hundreds of thousands are losing out on sick, holiday and parental pay due to "bogus self-employment”. Stories of outright cruelty to workers are daily news, from Sports Direct to Harrods. "Job satisfaction" is an oxymoron for millions.

Nor is this confined to those in traditionally low paid jobs. A growing number of frontline teaching staff at universities and colleges are on zero hours contracts. Junior Doctors are suffering a vicious attack on their pay and working conditions and the CMI reports that almost 80 per cent of managers have worked the equivalent of 29 days unpaid over the past year. Last year, they reported that job satisfaction was at a two year low.

Every Monday is a blue one. The saddest thing about it is that it doesn’t have to be this way. The solutions are right in front of us – and they’re not thinking about “career paths”, like the CIPD suggests, as if a desperate struggle to smash ourselves into the 1 per cent isn’t what’s got us into this mess in the first place.

If you want to really banish the blues at work, the only day off which will do you any good is a strike.

We’re unhappy because rights our parents and grandparents fought for have been taken from us, and we need to get them back. Join a union – and get your colleagues to. Ask your MP what they’re doing about zero hour contracts. Sign petitions to support Topshop cleaners or Amazon warehouse workers – or get a petition started to improve things in your own workplace. Stop pretending to your CEO that you’re fine with them earning ten times more than you do – and if you’re a CEO, stop pretending you’re fine with it too.

In short, we all need to realise that the logic behind the system which makes us feel like this is as dodgy as that behind Blue Monday itself. Nothing is more “bulls**t presented as fact” than the idea that work has to be exploitation.