January is supposed to be the time when we’re all focusing on becoming thinner, better, more efficient, more generous, higher up in our careers. Until February, that is, when, realising it’s the shortest on the calendar, we all switch instead to triumphantly quitting one of our vices for a month. One month changes everything.

Not me, though. No frivolous nonsense for me. This month I’m focusing on becoming a whole lot less… mortal. I know what you’re thinking. Zip it. I don’t have words for how completely disinterested I am in that kind of negativity.

Students at the University of Leicester’s physics department recently developed a model for predicting how long the human race could survive a zombie apocalypse, and published their findings in the peer-reviewed Journal of Physics Special Topics run by the University’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, no less, so surely it’s only a matter of time before they come up with something even smarter. Like a solution to the fact that more people die of natural causes over the festive season, for example. (I’m not making that up; yet another legitimate study released a few weeks ago.) Obviously this is why South African students have limited access to tertiary education. They want to do stupid things like HIV/Aids research. Everybody knows that’s going nowhere. They need to get with the First World.

Anyway. This talk of mortality flush at the beginning of the year got me coming over all melancholy. You felt the sadness too, admit it. There was cause for it. Obama’s extraordinary ability to drop words like – I don’t know, giant bombs of weeping gas – didn’t help.

“It’s like America’s amazing dad is leaving us,” wrote Wendi Aarons on Twitter, “and Mom’s new perverted boyfriend just pulled up in his Trans-Am.”

This is technically meant to be a roundup of all the weirdest news in recent weeks, so I don’t feel so bad bringing Obama’s graceful farewell vs. Trump’s ghastly stab-yourself-in-the-eye press conference up. Really, anything to do with Donald Trump being president should qualify (especially this gorgeous snippet about the Year of the Rooster mascot being sold out on account of its giant orange crown…) And let’s face it, about 50% of the reports coming from Russia should first go through a round at Ripley’s.

But honestly, the real reason I’m bringing it up is because it really drove home – like that horrific metaphorical Trans-Am – the end of an era. A death, if you will. And it rubbed in some of the more gruesome elements of public mourning.

How does one mourn a country being flushed down the toilet? South Africans have plenty of practice, and yet it seems we haven’t quite figured it out. There are some pretty singular death rituals around the world for the humans we love: the Famadihana ritual of the Malagasy people in Madagascar, for example, the annual washing of the bones, where the departed are dug up and cleaned, having been given prior notice of the party dates, so that their spirits do not miss it.

There’s endocannibalism, where the dead are honoured by eating them (I’ll pass), or the finger amputation by the bereaved in Papua New Guinea (later outlawed). And then the strangely beautiful practice of Sokushinbutsu, where Buddhist monks observed austerity to the point of death, entering mummification while still alive. But mourning a country (or one’s hope for it) is an entirely more abstract thing and despite all history’s instances of political failures, we don’t seem to have come up with a suitable ritual. This kind of mourning – with all its associated protest – is surely an even more performative process, and when one is demonstrating so clearly the death of your hopes, dreams and ideals, is it quite the done thing to stop and Instagram it?

Young South Africans seem to think so. Kids these days! Cue widespread consternation when the #deadpose craze struck in early January. Questionable taste? Probably.

Funny? Apart from the odd lighter moment:

… not to me, personally. Triggering to some? Most likely. But also, I think, a pulse reading. It says a lot about your country when the largest demographic are laughing themselves silly faking an array of increasingly horrifying deaths.

I’m still baffled, I have to say, around what this whole deadpose thing actually is. Is it even a thing? One critic chided that youngsters shouldn’t be posting these pictures on Twitter and Instagram in case their parents saw them and became upset. Are their parents even on Twitter and Instagram? Are we that old? Oh, Lord, have mercy. I’m sorry I mocked the University of Leicester. Please invent an anti-ageing potion.

What’s the joke in the #deadpose, though? I asked a couple of people who seemed to find it funny. Nobody could explain it, although it still seems to be going down like a homesick mole. The closest I got to an answer was that it was parody or satire. These things, our English teacher told us many moons ago, play on reality or familiar scenes.

Hmm.

Perhaps, then, it’s a form of protest. Has laughter evolved from being our saving grace to our elaborate death ritual? Are we laughing our way out of (or prematurely into) the grave because we’re dying too fast? If that’s what we’re doing, God help us, because then even Janus, poor fellow, probably doesn’t know which face to point where.

“Hahahah,” wrote one Twitter user. “South Africa needs deliverance!”

It’s not just South Africa, bud. But maybe there’s a purpose to all this: we can teach America something about the national facepalm. They’re going to need it.

Carpe noctem. DM