Monday is no longer the worst: what has happened to make Sunday the saddest day of the week for us?

The hatred of Mondays is more than established in Western culture.

Garfield the cat, endearing misanthrope created by Jim Davis, argued it eloquently: it is an atrocious hatred that returns week after week and is only overcome with "coffee, food and many hours of sleep".

Novels have been dedicated to him such as the rather discreet

, by Vicente Trigo Aranda, songs like Bob Geldof's homicidal reverie

.

Universities such as Flinders, Australia, or consultants as sensible as Gallup have tried to attribute a rational basis related to factors such as discontinuity in sleep levels or the strategies that our brain adopts to tolerate stress.

What's more, Robert Smith also hated the first day of the week with all his gothic soul and the Easybeats already warned us that on the “horrifying” Monday morning everything is annoying.

A Sky Travel advertising campaign convinced us, as far back as 2005, that a Monday, the third of January, is the most depressing day of the year.

And the

went a step further by stating that hateful Monday is the day you are most likely to suffer a cardiovascular accident.

More information

The language problem in 'The island of temptations': when your feelings are more complex than your vocabulary

In spite of everything, at this point in the film, the hatred of Monday has already become a petty-bourgeois and perfectly trivial passion, a feeling of temporary unease that we are more than accustomed to and that dissolves as soon as you take a shower and assume again , as Immanuel Kant would say, the imperative of the real.

In recent years, the target of hate (at least for that supposed elite of those who have a stable job and can afford to interrupt it during the weekend) has continued to shift towards Sunday.

What is hated the most right now in the networks

If not, take a look at a pair of twin threads on Reddit.

The titled

("Mondays are the worst") is a display of routine animosity, expressed without the slightest conviction by the same type of people who would take the trouble to note with reluctance that the water is wet or that the Real Madrid has the best track record in the history of football.

Instead,

(“I Hate Sundays and I Think They're Depressing”) is a masterpiece of refined hate, elevated to the level of art.

And what about its successors,

(still flagged as an unpopular opinion by community users, perhaps the world of 2019 was not ready to accept such an uncomfortable truth), I Hate

and

Also read the scholarly opinion of one Leslie Hancock, a US citizen of a certain age, on

: "I've hated Sundays since I entered middle age."

Immediately afterwards, he traces the origins of that hatred in a childhood in which religious commitments and the ominous shadow of Monday, the day on which the "numbing" routine of going back to school was going to be consummated, conspired to dye the world with sorrow. Sunday leisure.

It is of little use that psychologists like Dr. Joseph Suglia, who appears, also on

, as a novelist, pretend that Sunday "is just any day" and that it can be enjoyed like any other "if you keep busy" and don't let "capitalism and religions" take over the day by giving it a meaning and a purpose that does not have to have.

But Suglia's pedestrian rationalism does not make a dent in his interlocutors.

Everyone hates Sunday.

Some, with much greater fervor and intensity than on Monday.

Sunday is groundhog day

Rachel Cooke, a columnist for

, has made one of the happiest attempts to map and map that hate.

For Cooke, "it is by no means accidental that both the opening and the climax of

John Osborne's classic play

place on a Sunday."

For anyone wanting to “wring their throats out of the tedium, pettiness, narrow-mindedness, and depressing everyday habits of 1956 England, there was no better time of the week to start and end with.”

The protagonist, another manual misanthrope, although much less endearing than Garfield, verbalizes his disdain with icy virulence in one of the most remembered moments of the work: “God, how I hate Sundays.

They are so depressing.

Always the same.

We are never able to go even one sad step further.

Always the same ritual.

Read the newspaper, drink tea, iron clothes.

A few hours pass and goodbye to another week.

Our youth is going down the drain.

Is that what you want?".

The Osborne of the 1950s hit the nail on the head at the conclusion of this depressing scene.

The three characters locked in a room in the throes of Sunday tedium considered doing something different, going to the movies, for example, but they ended up ruling it out due to the obvious laziness of the author of the previous monologue, who, after all, preferred to stay at home. to drain the dregs of the accursed day to the end.

What better definition of that Sunday syndrome, of that window open to melancholy.

A day when leisure degenerates into tedium and gives rise to nihilistic reflections, in which apparently there is nothing to do, but what really happens is that the spirit and the will to do anything falter.

Cooke subscribes to a revolutionary thesis: that

the Sunday depression

perhaps made perfect sense in that England (and, by extension, in the whole of Christian Western Europe three-quarters of a century ago) in which Sundays they implied “closed pubs and shops, open churches and empty streets”, generating a premortuary atmosphere that invited “anguish over the irresistible futility of life”.

But in today's world, Sundays are no longer a radical break from the rest of the week.

We no longer live trapped in that logic of five days of work, one of voracious consumption and unbridled and unhealthy leisure and another of rest, hangover, debauchery and boredom.

We have alternatives.

We can turn Sunday into another Saturday.

Or on a healthy, industrious, and sensible Wednesday.

Recipes to cope with the Sunday blues

Against Cooke's voluntarism, there are those who oppose statistics as overwhelming as that 76% of Americans and Canadians (a figure, of course, that cannot be extrapolated to Spain without further ado) suffer those inexplicable bouts of sadness that we know with some frequency. Like Sunday Syndrome.

What's more, German and Swedish scientists suggest that Sunday, not the reviled Monday, is the saddest day of the week and Friday, not the overvalued Saturday, is the happiest.

That, in the opinion of Australian psychologist Marny Lishman, could be because, as creatures aware of our mortality and the transience of time, "we live less in the present than projected into the immediate future."

Friday, although it is a working day for the majority of salaried workers, we especially enjoy "the imminence of freedom" and leisure.

An expectation.

And on Sunday we are mortified by “the proximity of Monday, the return to routine and unpleasant obligations”, and also the realization that this expectation of Friday has not materialized, because it very rarely does.

As one of the characters in the movie of the moment,

says : “I have experienced all possible lives and I have bad news: none of them are worth living.

Nothing really matters, everything is the same”.

If it is true that it is the inexorable logic of life projected towards an imminent future and of expectations that are never fully realized that makes (almost) all of us Sunday nihilists, the syndrome is very difficult to solve.

Unlike cats, which John Gray already explained to us as Stoic philosophers who have already reached ataraxia, we are not programmed to enjoy the moment without interference.

Luckily, specialists in health and psychological well-being such as Robert Half propose possible antidotes to counteract the Sunday blues, tricks like “conceiving your weekend as a compact whole and planning it from Friday afternoon, to fill it with content”.

Also "dedicate some time to some activity related to your work that you find rewarding", thus softening to some extent the forced landing in the Monday routine.

Some of the cumbersome obligations are best reserved for Saturday, so that we don't associate Sunday with just boring chores, like calling that distant relative on the phone to whom we really have nothing to say.

And yes, relax, sleep well, read a book, watch a good movie, anticipate the positive events that are going to take place during the work week.

All of that is supposed to work.

Lishman also believes in the virtues of resorting to a certain mental discipline as a remedy against "melancholy and pre-depressive states."

If none of the above works for you, consider for a moment Rachel Cooke's alternative recipe: we no longer live in Europe in the 1950s, let's go out into the streets, enjoy our leisure, find something stimulating to do, because surely we ended up finding it.

So we can, perhaps, restore the balance of the Force and refocus our hatred on the day that has made the most historical efforts to deserve it: Monday.

You can follow ICON on