Beating The Sunday Blues

Today is Sunday. Tonight, almost three-quarters of the world’s working population will fall asleep feeling some level of the Sunday Blues.

Three. Quarters.

How did we create a world with a statistic like this? Simple: take a decade of a child’s life to make sure they’re proficient in a short list of things we’ve decided they should be, and leave them almost no space to explore any deeper meaning or purpose.

Children have interests, passions, hopes and dreams, and when you listen closely you realise they’re actually pretty serious about exploring them. But when the good-grade pressure kicks in the dreams get put on a shelf, and by then someone else has started shaping up new ones for them anyway. Usually, dreams that are more ‘practical’ and ‘sensible’. We don’t even know it’s happening until we look back later in life, reminiscing about the things we wish we’d spent more time on.

Most of us never had a chance. Anything not purely academic is given far less time, energy and respect, so regardless of how we start out we’re all funnelled into careers that are weighted away from the creative. Really, it’s not at all surprising that the world isn’t enjoying the work of more thriving, fulfilled makers and creators. It's not that you can't make a living that way, it's that you weren't given the opportunity to work out how to while you were growing up.

The default schedule, subjects and career options have been set. The result so far? More people than not deciding they don’t like Monday.

The solution to fixing our Sunday Blues epidemic is quite simple: drop academic standardisation. In its place, put the space and support young people need to discover and fine-tune that magic intersection between things they enjoy, things they’re good at, and things that bring value to other people’s lives.

We need to work hard on turning this three-quarter statistic around.

Should we start on Monday?