Are You Having a 'September Reset'?

Are you having a 'September Reset'?  You might well be, even if you don't know what that particular piece of jargon means.  It's another example of that phenomenon where somebody, either in the media or one of those insufferable online 'influencers', coins a term to describe something that people have been doing forever and pretends that it is a new trend they've invented/discovered.  Like 'Quiet Quitting' - remember that?  It was a term that started going around post-Covid lockdowns, to describe how people tired of their tedious jobs were simply going through the motions, doing the absolute minimum required of them to avoid being sacked.  As I noted at the time, some of us had been doing it long before Covid, it just wasn't called that then.  (It's actually amazing how far you can go with this approach to work without anyone noticing - it was especially easy for me, I found, as my 'job from Hell' required me to be out of the office and away from scrutiny for most of my working hours.  It wasn't as if I wasn't doing anything, I wasn't sneaking off home, for instance, I just did the absolute bare minimum).   Getting back to that 'September Reset' - it's simply that September, for many of us, represents a natural point to make changes in our lives, reassess things and so on.  

There are several reasons for this, for one thing September marks the end of Summer and the beginning of Autumn and the start of the run-in to the end of the year.  But, even more significantly, it traditionally marks the end of the school Summer holidays and the start of a new academic year - for those in education it quite literally marks the start of a new year.  For those of us who spent an extended time in education, (in my case both as a post-grad student, then, somewhat later, as a trainee teacher and supply lecturer), the feeling of September being a new start lingers long after we leave the field.  My main Summer leave from work usually used to be in late August and early September - I often wondered if I was subconsciously trying to harmonise it with the start of the academic year.  Indeed, if it straddled the two months, as soon as September started, I'd get a feeling that it was time to start winding up my holiday activities and focus on getting back to work.  So, yeah, September is a perfectly natural time to be reflective and reassess things.  I still do it, mainly because it is when the good weather starts to break up and I can't spend as much time outdoors, so the Summer trips that characterise June, July and August for me, wind down and my mind turns back to such things as home improvements, repairs, insurance renewals, car MoTs and the like.  But now, it seems, we have to label this phenomena, to call it something and have those 'influencers' and media types 'codify' it for us and tell us exactly what we should be doing in our 'September Reset'.  Well, screw them, I'll just carry on as I've always done.