Blue Monday: Stop and think before you grumble on Twitter

As I stood at the bus stop this morning, fat rain drops splashing off my face, I stared glumly at the umbrellas surrounding me and regretted my decision to dash out of the house without one. I had woken up late and barely had time to apply a wobbly line of eyeliner or find a pair of un-laddered tights before I sprinted out into the downpour.

Eyeing the umbrellas enviously, my cold fingers fumbled with the Twitter app on my iPhone, but before I could craft a wittily-worded whine a bus arrived and I ducked under the brolly wielding throng, squeezing myself under the armpit of an equally soggy, equally fed up commuter. So far, Blue Monday was living up to all expectations.

Black Friday, Manic Monday, Fail Friday - we’ve heard them all. Blue Monday, apparently the most miserable day of the year, is the latest in a long line of ridiculously named days, christened thus to give desperate journalists something to write about.

According to researchers who have analysed more than two million tweets over the past three years, the first Monday back in the office after New Year is the day when people post the most negative tweets. But couldn’t the prefix “blue” be applied to…well…every Monday?

With our Twitter pages never more than a couple of clicks away, come Monday morning the micro-blogging site becomes clogged with pictures of crowded trains, “7am start, sad face” Instagrams, and pathetic bleats about the drizzle. Congested timelines come to a standstill as stranded Londoners moan about the Circle line, parents on the school run panic about traffic, and everyone wishes they’d drunk less and slept more over the weekend.

When we use world-changing technology to grumble about our, relatively easy, lives, it’s hard not to worry about the state of the human condition. George Osborne announced that £25bn more cuts are needed to get the economy on track, but did you hear about the person in Vauxhall who waited FIFTEEN MINUTES for a tube this morning?

(I am by no means excluding myself from this critique, having just tweeted about a minor lunch mishap involving a long queue and a forgotten purse. #BlueMonday.)

Yes, the bus didn’t come on time and yes, you’re drenched from head to toe, and YES someone left a plate full of congealed food on your desk over the weekend, but in the long run is it really worth a passive aggressive tweet that next to no one will read? In my experience, venting via social media only succeeds in using up time which could be better spent day-dreaming about Benedict Cumberbatch.

So, if you find your fed-up fingers twitching over the “compose tweet” button today, here are three slightly jollier things you could tweet about: 1) Weekend plans. Only five days to go! 2) How the hell did TV show Splash get past ITV executives? 3) This article.

There, sorted. Next stop, Cheerful Tuesday.