spring forward, fall back
Every fall, I get really introverted for a couple of weeks. There’s something about the time of year — when it’s suddenly dark a lot earlier, and you have to put on a jacket to go outside, and the trees are starting to go bare — that makes me feel inclined to stay home and avoid being around people in large groups.
This usually passes by mid-November, and I go back to being a more balanced, sociable introvert in time for the holidays. But this week I find myself taking it slow, feeling sleepy a lot, and not getting as much done overall. (Unfortunately that’s a problem, because next week I’ve got a conference presentation to prepare, a website to release, and a vacation to plan.)
It’s got me thinking, though, about how our society in general is designed to completely ignore the seasons. Most people work in buildings that are climate-controlled and artificially lit; it’s possible for many people to get from home to the garage to the car to work without once having to set foot on the actual ground.
There are good reasons for this, of course; being cold and wet sucks, and office cultures demand a style of dress that doesn’t really work for spending time outside. But I wonder if we aren’t losing something important at the same time.
The seasons determine every single thing that happens in the ‘natural world’. They used to determine pretty much every single thing about human life as well, but in the past 100 years we’ve gotten to the point where outwardly they don’t make much difference at all in people’s day-to-day routines.
On the one hand this totally rocks for us, because being warm and well-fed beats being cold and hungry any day. On the other hand, just because we’ve conquered the seasons outwardly, doesn’t mean that we’ve conquered them inwardly as well. Could the year-round, unchanging demands of modern life actually be detrimental to us, when they conflict with some deeper, inherited rhythms and needs that do cause us to change with the seasons? Could people actually be worse off because we are expected to have the same range of moods, same levels of energy and creativity, year round? Or because we expect ourselves to be so?
I wonder if we could somehow arrive at a happy medium, a way to design our buildings and cities and schedules and lives such that they gracefully acknowledge the changing seasons, while continuing to modulate the worst extremes?
