For the past couple of Januaries, I have been ostensibly obsessed with the concept of “January”. By this, I mean not just the month, but what the period of time represents and the unique sociological, psychological, and emotional effects it has on me and (I presume) a great deal of other people. What are the conditions that make the psychology of January a somewhat universal condition? To answer this question, I have developed a lot of thoughts and theories about the month, as well as several fun facts that add to the paradigm. So the point of this post is to discuss the various conditions that the month of January creates.
Historically I’ve been very negative towards the month of January. I am biased against it because I consider it The Worst Month. My tier list of months looks something like this:
A - September, October, June, and December
B - July, August, May,
C - April, November
D - February, March
F – January
There is much more of a positive slant to the warmer months, and the “-ber’s” are always quite dreamy in my eyes. But still, I think that January is the worst month. And perhaps this is unfair to the month. January just has the unforgiving role of being the first month to start the year. The following points are the elements that are unique to January, which creates the conditions for the emotional state found only in January, which I have dubbed the January Blues.
I. New Year’s Day – January is wholly defined as the first month of the year, the big “01” when one commences to write the date. New Year’s Day is a fascinating period of time because it represents a starting over point on the whole Global (read Gregorian) Calendar. It’s a cosmic return, but also a social return to a globally recognized event. Every person who acknowledges the year 2023 is thereby held to the fact that 01/01/2023 is the starting point in this new year, they are bound by this temporal knowledge. New Year’s Day, and consequently January, are emblematic of a new time, and the holiday itself is responsible for an alteration in the social and psychological responses to the change of time. I go into greater detail about “time and psychology” in my Birthday as Orienting time post, so I won’t elongate this all too much, but I do believe that any person who is connected to a global understanding of time is psychologically affected by New Years Day, based on how central it is to how we as a this “global society” recognize and acknowledge passing time.
II. A Temporal (and Physical) Hangover – I often describe January as a month that feels like a hangover. This is likely because the first day of the month often has some element of hangover-ness due to New Year’s Eve Celebrations – too much Prosecco and a late late night. Rarely have I been surrounded by folks saying, “Wow I feel stellar” post-NYE party. It’s mostly head in hands, greasy breakfast sandwiches, and desperately clutching a glass of some electrolyte-heavy beverage to stop the bad feels that first morning of the new year.
But January is much more than that New Year’s Day Hangover. My January Theory is that the whole month is effectively a hangover from the year before, and especially the whole holiday period on the back end of December. There is that whole ambiguous period from Dec. 24th to Dec 31st that is basically the closest thing modern humans will get to timelessness during a calendar year. So, it’s not fully surprising that the first couple of days in January could be, in fact, literal hangovers from a festivity-normalized bender. But after this period of a physical hangover, when headaches cease and hydration levels return to stasis, sometimes approximately around January 5th or 6th, a more existential hangover develops. It’s the serotonin depletion from the year before; all the holidays, all the memories from the year prior, experiences, people one met, etc., come crashing down in January’s early days. And I don’t think people shake that temporal crush until at least mid-February.
III. The Weather - The New Year and the Temporal Hangover set the psychological stage for January. But the atmospheric reality of January is also quite grim, at least in the places I have lived. I’m sure equatorial or Southern Hemisphere Januaries are entirely different species from what I am used to. The month is colored by an idiosyncratic spectrum of grays; “January Gray” can be its own color in a box of crayons. The big gray empty is hard to qualify on a verbal level; it’s the color of being hungover, eating leftovers, and not being able to select a movie to watch. Look at the data: temperatures from 28º to 42º, the sunset range from 1/1 to 1/31 is something around 16:34-17:08 (NYC time), and there is no moisture in the air, which implies the threat of constant dehydration. This does not put a smile on anyone’s face. Between the weather and time, January does have the cards stacked against it in terms of it being “a good time”
IV. January, A History – Before I get into the more psychological elements of January I will touch on the “history” of January. I find myself in that sweet spot between boredom and curiosity during this month which is the prime condition for random research. I decided to consider the actual history of January and it turns out to be super fascinating. So, way back when on the original Roman Calendars (which is what our modern Gregorian Calendar is based on) there were only 10 months. This is why September, October, November, and December are named the way they are because they were the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th months respectively. The Calendar was only 301 days and the year began in March as the weather picked up to a respectable degree. Post-Saturnalia celebrations in December the year just ended and society entered into a period of time known only as “Winter” or periods of non-productivity. Eventually, those periods of time got picked up and became their own sweet little months: January and February (imagine living in a point in history when “time” was still a work in progress?). To think that January was the last addition on what we call the normal calendar does make one consider…
V. January’s Namesake – The fact that to this day we allocate names, often from ancient Gods to chunks of day-to-day tedium is just so surreal. How we unconsciously evocate Roman or Greek or Nordic deities when saying things like “Thursday” or “March” just seems so primordial, but the banality of “Wednesdays” takes the whole nature of the namesake to seem anti-holy. And the fact that 1/6th of our months are named after REAL historical figures (Julius and Augustus Ceasar) blows me away. Like, imagine being so important in history that some of the best months are named after you until this day. Wild. I think my biggest academic fetish is when almost antiquated and mythological elements snowball into the foundations of the modern world. And that’s the case with January.
January, like a great deal of the other months, is in fact named after a God of antiquity.
January is named after Janus, the ancient Roman God of time, beginnings and endings, duality, and change as well as doorways, passages, and frames. The traditional representation of January is a figure with two faces, one perpetually
looking forward and the other backwards. I think that Janus perfectly encapsulates the psychology of how people experience January. A figure stuck in a point of linear time looking both backwards and forwards, entering through the gateway of a new year, framing time in a very specific way. Being the patron saint of January, I think the mythological figure does embody how we as modern humans regard the month: as a period of change. It’s a true Joseph Campbell vibe, and one of the reasons myths are so essential for understanding our contemporary psyche.
Image from Wikipedia.
VI. Reflections… – Janus encapsulates the January vibe because it is the month of reflections – looking back on the new year. I think it’s a nasty position to reflect on time because I think due to January’s less-than-great conditions (e.g. hangover, weather, etc.) we are predisposed to have a negative slant on the past year. It’s not “what I did this past year and what I am proud of” but it’s more “what I didn’t do”. January’s nature predisposes one to have a glass-half-empty approach. It’s become a practice for me to write down lists of the things that I’ve accomplished and what I’m proud of to offset this default approach. But regardless of the temperament of the reflection, January is a month in which (I think) people tend to be reflective and think a lot about themselves and time, a condition which is less natural in other months of the year.
VII. …and Projection – And Janus also looks forward, and this element of a projective January is much more prominent. New Year’s Resolutions, The “New Year New Me” mantra and various detoxing or new year’s challenges are staples of classic January behavior. There is a sociological phenomenon here in the west that the New Year (read January) is the time in which the whole culture is supposed to reflect on goals and be motivated to accomplish them: “I will read more”, “I will lose weight”, “I will be more productive, I will accomplish my dreams” etc. There is this expectation that one is supposed to set up all these goals (usually this is supposed to be in December, but as I said people tend to be a touch preoccupied at the end of December) and then use the rest of the year to accomplish them. January is once again a sneaky devil here though because axiomatically it is impossible to get anything done in January.
There is a bit of a feedback loop in which the nature of January (sections I-III) combined with the desire to accomplish, results in, for a lack of a better word, stagnation. This is called January’s Paradox. When one enters January, goals are at 100% whereas actionable motivation and ability to Get Things Done (GTD) is near 0%. The GTD factor is influenced by all the above statements – bad weather, little celebration, all the talk of recalibrations, exhaustion, etc. January’s Paradox is thus in effect: the desire to accomplish is present but, as stated earlier, it is impossible to actually do anything in January. Compare this to trying to do things during a hangover, the harder you try the less productive you are. What this creates is a hellish compounding system where all one wants to do is accomplish their goals, but they cannot, so they try harder, but because of the 0% GTD factor any effort put into goals is, effectively, diminished to nothingness. Consequently, one just feels worse as the month goes on because their goals are not being accomplished and the general January malaise.
A concrete example of January’s Paradox in action: your NYG (New Year Goal) is to run more. You try to get out and run. But a) you are both literally and existentially hungover b) the weather is sub-optimal running conditions and c) you are generally wiped from a return to normality (i.e. the end of the holiday season) and d) you are less fit than you normally might be due to holiday binging. So, your goals are effectively squandered because of January’s harsh conditions – but you know you are supposed to be motivated because, after all, “New Year New Me”, but January’s GTD factor inhibits her from all this. Thus, January’s Paradox makes you feel diminished about not accomplishing your goal. But don’t worry, it is not your fault, it is January’s fault.
But I think that setting these goals, practices like dry January, writing intentions, and projections, is so essential to the January spirit. Yes, it might be tricky to actually accomplish a lot of these goals during the month of January, but it does lay down the foundation for the remainder of 2023. Like mythological namesakes, these things tend to snowball, and having a positive outlook is valuable because it’s always about looking forward.
The January Blues are essentially the emotional results of all these different conditions. They are the temporal hangover of the year before, they are the shitty weather, they are January’s paradox, and they are the compounding effect of all these elements put into a snow globe and being shaken together. The January Blues are the natural result of being honest with oneself and one’s priorities as you reflect on the past year and look toward the future. The January Blues are living in a society where winter is what it is. It’s the realization that time is circular and that things repeat, and it’s also the realization that things can’t go back to the way things were and that the future is unpredictable. All these compounding elements about the month result in the January Blues, and this is a natural part of the year, every year.
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