We can all be happier in 2024, but only if we learn to actually speak to one another again

The best part of the dead spacey time between Christmas and new year is also often the most overlooked. For one week a year, or thereabouts, you’ll get to experience a rarity in London: strangers will say hello to you. More accurately, they’ll say happy Christmas or wish you a prosperous new year. Or if they can’t quite muster that level of frank Americana friendliness, they’ll at least offer a tight-mouthed smile of greeting as you pass by. Then, of course, January hits in earnest. The city, the country and the world are grey again and we all go back to resolutely ignoring one another. Is it any wonder we’re so miserable the other 51 weeks of the year?

This isn’t an anecdotal, released earlier this year, proves it. Research found that a third of Britons don’t feel optimistic about the future. Obviously, a lack of chats with strangers in the street isn’t the root cause of that unhappiness. It’s the bigger things through which we derive our wellbeing: our families have the biggest impact on how happy we feel (32 per cent) followed by our finances (27 per cent) and our romantic relationships (26 per cent). But these are big, complicated, thorny issues. We don’t ultimately have control over our relationships with others, and a spiralling cost of living crisis means financial stress is never far away – and not something we can undo ourselves either. The things we can control, the small acts we can do to make our lives better, are often the things we think of as trivial: the fleeting moments of human connection we can offer each other to make a bad day a little bit better.