It’s time to celebrate all the little things in life, according to an annoyingly upbeat Belgian campaigner. But what if whingeing is actually good for you?

April may be the cruellest month – but January is easily the most depressing. The weather outside is frightful and, around this time, everyone’s despondently giving up their new year resolutions. It’s dreary and dark and, if you’re the complaining sort (which, you may have noticed, I quite definitively am), there’s – waves hands vaguely at our crumbling dumpster fire of a planet – a lot to complain about. Indeed, a new report has found that champagne sales are sinking. Not just because of dry January, but because people can’t find much to celebrate.

Enter Isabelle Gonnissen, a Belgian woman who seems to be annoyingly obsessed with positivity. She wants all the whingers and whiners out there to change their tune and celebrate the little things in life. Several years ago, Gonnissen launched a 30 Days Without Complaining challenge in Belgium; this year, she’s reportedly bringing it to the Netherlands. According to the NL Times, the campaign launched on Blue Monday (the third Monday of January), which is supposed to be the most depressing day of the year. It probably isn’t, by the way. Rather, Blue Monday is a pseudoscientific PR stunt that entrenched itself into our consciousness because it feels kind of true – but I’m not going to grumble about that now. In fact, I’m going to try not to grumble at all. There’s no way I can give up complaining for 30 days, but I’ll heroically give it a go for the next few sentences.

Having done his best to shut down the social media platform, the new president is now being hailed as its saviour. And once again the Democrats have egg on their faces

Politics in the US has had its fair share of stupid moments, but the recent banning and (sort of) unbanning of TikTok may rank as one of the stupidest. At the same time, the episode neatly encapsulates the current moment: it’s a perfect example of Donald Trump’s showmanship, the Democrats’ incompetence and the limits of bipartisanship. If I were a TikTok teen I’d come up with some sort of experimental dance to illustrate these themes but I’m old and completely devoid of rhythm, so words are going to have to suffice.

Let’s start with Trump, who, with his usual talent for self-promotion, has positioned himself as the guy who brought TikTok back from the dead, despite being responsible for signing its death warrant in the first place. To refresh everyone’s memory, in 2020 Trump issued vaguely worded executive orders that described TikTok and WeChat as threats to national security. There doesn’t seem to be much evidence, by the way, that TikTok is any more of a threat to national security than any of the other data-sucking apps we all have on our phones. The main argument from its critics seems to be that it has Chinese owners – and they’re clearly not going to be responsible stewards of people’s data in the way that Americans such as Mark Zuckerberg are.