The Issue:

Frequently, people are reminded of tragic events in their past on the anniversary of that date, e.g. “August 1…. ahh, that was the day that my beloved dog was eaten by a crocodile… I’ll never forget the trauma of AUGUST FIRST.”

Proposal:

As world-renowned therapists and psychologists would presumably agree, the important thing about dealing with memories and feelings is to repress them completely.

But this is difficult to do with events that have a memorable date attached: the calendar date provides an unavoidable reminder of the event. Initially, this seems impossible to solve: after all, there’s only one calendar, right?

Of course, this is not so! In addition to many defunct historical calendars, there are around 10 calendar choices with full software support in the modern era (Figure 1).

In order for a person to no longer be reminded of traumatic events on their anniversary, they can just switch to a different calendar entirely.

For example, if January 28, 2024 is a traumatic date, we can simply switch to the Coptic calendar (see drop-down menu in Figure 1) and discover that today’s date is alternately the 19^th of Toba, in the year 1740.

(Obviously there is no “August” in this calendar, so “August 1” will never be seen again—no more crocodile-related bad memories!)

Conclusion:

This system will even work if a person uses up all the real calendars (due to excessive traumatic anniversaries), they can simply create a new personal calendar system (Figure 2) each time it is needed.

PROS: Improves national mental health, and may be a boon for the “custom calendar printing” market.

CONS: Could make it more difficult for a person to schedule things, e.g. imagine finding this in an email message: “We’ve scheduled you for an important job interview on the 74^th day of Zovember, 1076 B.Y.O.B.”