Monday is nowhere near as bad as everyone says it is

Monday is about as popular as a bleach-flavoured birthday cake shaped like Adolf Hitler’s face. Scroll through this link. Hatred of Monday brings us together like nothing else. Starting on Sunday evening, and going through well into lunchtime the next day, the derision, and the I hate Monday memes, begin to flow.

Every Monday generates the same anxieties. There’s absolutely nothing to look forward to on Mondays. Nothing interesting ever happens on Mondays. You always feel your worst on Mondays. You are less engaged on Mondays. You’re harder on yourself on Mondays. You’re more likely to have a stroke on a Monday. You’re more likely to commit suicide on a Monday. The weekend is so far away from Monday that it appears as a mirage, an impossible hallucination; it is an entire mountain of bullshit away.

Slowly, surely, the word “Monday” has become the shortest horror story in the English language.

Genuine question: how bad can life be if all you have to complain about is the day that’s furthest away from Friday night? I’d argue that there’s always worse out there than Monday, there are still distances to go, lower places to dwell in. Which is why the deluge of Garfield memes and #MondayMotivation retweets that proliferate like a rash across the internet on Sunday night baffle me. They don’t relate to my experience of Mondays in any way. In fact, I’m starting to suspect that people who hate on Monday don’t hate Monday at all. Nah, they definitely hate their jobs, maybe they hate their lives, quite possibly they hate themselves, but Monday? I don’t think they really get Monday at all.

On Monday the world begins afresh. It has recovered the novelty it lost in the last week. It’s purer, freer. After two days off you should be able to sit at a desk and easily get on with your shit. It’s not the struggle we like to think it is. And even if you do feel that way, surely making it through Monday means you end the day on a high?

On Monday you should never struggle for chat. All you have to do is say the magic words: what did you get up to on the weekend then?  Strong follow-up questions, which I’ll give you for free, include: no way really? How much did that cost? Why? Did you enjoy it? Monday is a free pass through the world of awkward, brittle conversation. You might even get some solid gossip out of it. If you can’t talk to the people you see on Monday you’re going to be completely screwed on Tuesday when there’s no conversational safety net.

And speaking of Tuesday: it is easily worse than Monday. Easily. It’s Monday without the freshness. It’s the moment when you realise, actually, this week is going to long and grim and interminable. Tuesday’s when you start accumulating the real baggage that’ll be weighing you down until Friday night.

We don’t romanticise Monday and we probably never will. We’ll keep slating it in the most basic, unnecessary, useless ways.  But I can’t shake the feeling that people who need motivation to get through Mondays are the people who’ll end up crying on bicycles rather than laughing in Audis.