The Psychic Costs of the Year in Review

The wave of depression that annually engulfs millions of Americans over the year-end holiday period finally has a name. “We experts call it Media-Triggered Self-Esteem Collapse syndrome,” explains one expert. And it is creating a new class of Americans. “We call them the New Morons,” adds another.

“But this is entirely unlike the usual year-end blows to one’s self-esteem,” chimes in a third. “Stuff like finding out that the handwritten signature on the boss’ Christmas card is actually printed, or not getting your insurance agent’s annual thermometer-in-a-calendar gift this year. You know, those little omens of life’s futility. Not that at all.

“Media-Triggered Self-Esteem Collapse Syndrome, and the New Morons it breeds, stem from a basic but tragically too often ignored fact: 98.9% of all media activity in the last two weeks of every year--just when millions of Americans have nothing better to do than sit around soaking it all up--is devoted to reviews, recaps and roundups. There’s your culprit! That’s why spirits plunge and even smart folks become convinced their brainpans are full of pocket lint!”

How so? “Just read a few case histories!” snaps yet another expert. Case histories like that of “Evi” of Newport Beach, for example. “Subject bubbled with joie de vivre right up until the day after Christmas,” reads the research summary, “when she happened to see a newspaper roundup of 1998’s 100 best books. The great reads of the year, and she realizes in going down the list that she’d managed to read part of the dust jacket of one while standing in line to pay for a horoscope magazine and a Taurus bookmark. She suddenly thought she was a moron. In her shame, ‘Evi’ ordered vanity license plates reading ‘0 IQ.’ Won’t even watch Oprah now because it’s ‘too intellectual.’ A life ruined, all because of an end-of-the-year list.

“Or consider happy-go-lucky ‘Ed,’ a Santa Monica screenwriter. Happy-go-lucky, that is, before he encountered Cinesnob magazine’s annual 10 Best Festival ratings and saw the Fond du Lac Independent Black & White Documentary Festival rated seventh. You see, Ed--the same Ed whose entry had taken a Golden Coconut in the ’98 Yemen Film Festival--hadn’t even known there was a Fond du Lac festival. Crushed? The guy nose-dived. Went into a Media-Triggered Self-Esteem Collapse so deep that he bad-mouthed his own idea at a pitch meeting. A week later he’d been reduced to writing sitcom pilots for ABC-TV.”

The supermodel who had someone read her W’s list of Milan’s 10 trendiest restaurants, realized she had only eaten at nine and in her plunging self-esteem fled the runways for the midway to become a circus fat lady. The Kansas City TV meteorologist who could only recall 19 of the Weather Channel’s 20 Worst Tornadoes of ’98 and in self-disgust switched to sports--in time to discover that he had never heard of half the athletes mentioned in a year-end roundup of Great Sports Moments. He is now the station janitor.

Typical casualties of M.T.S.E.C.S., these otherwise normal Americans. But the syndrome strikes more than Americans. Take the foreign minister of East Timor--which M.T.S.E.C.S. did, after he read one newsmagazine’s year-end list of the 50 hottest global hot spots and promptly resigned, confessing he couldn’t locate 16 of them on his office globe.

“To the victim, it’s like housecleaning with a vacuum that doesn’t have a bag,” clucks one expert in explaining the insidious effects of M.T.S.E.C.S. “You realize it was your year, too. You were there for every day of it--but that glut of info, those recaps and reviews and roundups, only remind you of everything you didn’t pick up in the first place or flat failed to retain. Time was when all you had to know about the 12 months just past was Time magazine’s “Man of the Year.” Now, it’s everybody from Hollywood’s 10 Biggest Brats to Brazil’s 20 Hottest Up-and-Coming Arbitrageurs, and everything from the Internet’s Worst-Performing Ventriloquism Web sites to the year’s five top nonstories in polymer research. What’s the poor average sap to do?”

Can science provide a cure or even mild help for the beleaguered New Morons? “Not a chance,” snaps an expert previously unheard from. “The list-making’s only going to get heavier as the age of infoglut waxes, and meanwhile the end-of-year time period for absorbing it all is going to stay the same.

“Even though it’s early to make predictions, I’d say Media-Triggered Self-Esteem Collapse syndrome is going to make my list of the top 10 new American mental-health crises of 1999. But hey, it’s a long, long year. So let’s wait till next December!”