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❄️🌬️☃️❄️ Winter Solstice 2024 ❄️☃️🌬️❄️
House 🐺 Stark was right. Today is the Winter Solstice. ❄️ Winter ❄️ is no longer coming. ☃️ It’s here.
🦉 Wisdom In Hardship 🥶
The pine stays green in winter… wisdom in hardship. ~Norman Douglas
That’s part of the reason that people had Yule celebrations way back when. The evergreen trees standing watch until their apparently dead neighbors sprung fresh with new buds and fruit in the Spring symbolized the promise of ongoing life.
Also, the down season was the time when all the preparations of the warmer seasons paid off. All the stuff that was brined, sugar-cured, dried or canned had been set by for the time when nothing was growing and it was too cold and miserable to go out foraging. You stayed home. You hunkered down. You spent quality time with the family.
Yes, I know “quality time” is a 20th Century invention to assuage the the guilt that Boomers never actually felt about leaving their latchkey kids to their own devices. Even so, if you’re an ancient or medieval person living in a cabin in the woods or a cottage in a village and there’s nothing to do but stay inside and keep warm, you come up with something to pass the time. You tell stories. You play games. You break out the stored foodstuffs and get creative with the preparation to help lighten the mood.
Winter or any other season or setting of privation is a test of the human will. Some people have strategies for toughing it out. Some people simply migrate somewhere warmer for the season to continue their normal foraging lifestyle. Some people just curl up in a ball and freeze to death. Everybody has their own coping mechanism.
In an age where people can thrive in any environment and can access the products and services of businesses worldwide, it’s hard to imagine how rough winter used to be. I’m just glad we only have to imagine it anymore. We’ve moved on and the world is getting better by the day.
☀️ Reason For The Season 🌎
What happens during the winter solstice?
Not everybody has winter as we think of it. It’s a uniquely Northern Hemisphere phenomenon. If you watched the short video above, you can see why.
The nice thing about having seasons is that it teaches moderation and planning. My anthropology class in college had us studying two tribes. One lived in perpetual privation and one lived in perpetual abundance.
The tribe who lived in the Kalahari Desert had to live in harmony to simply survive. They were agreeable and had a graduated crisis response model. They’d joke around and mitigate bad feelings to keep things from escalating. If they escalated anyway, they had another layer of mitigation and another and another until, rarely, hostility broke out.
The tribe who lived in the rainforests of Papua / New Guinea had fresh food everywhere, all the time. Hungry? There’s a tree with fruit, there are roots, there are pigs and other game ready for the taking. All the time, no worries. And yet… These guys had a societal structure with so many rules that nothing could ever get done and they had perpetual war with their neighbors. The worst part was that it was all some kind of demented game, when you looked at it impartially.
That was weird to me. In a world of abundance, these people ought to be able to have a tremendously happy life. I guess, from their perspective, they did. But they looked incredibly petty and prone to squabble over utter nonsense.
It worries me for the coming age of AI-enabled abundance.
And yet, it doesn’t.
The rainforest guys had always been in abundance, so they had (for no apparent reason) come up with bizarre nonsense to give their lives some structure.
We came from a civilization where seasons mattered. Planning mattered. We knew what privation could lead to. We knew about the ants and the grasshopper.
So, even though the rainforest guys show us that absolute, perpetual abundance doesn’t lead to Star Trek, it leads to pointless ritual, internecine squabbles and people tying gourds to their junk. No, really, they run around the jungle with these long skinny gourds tied to their privates and fastened to their necks like artificial erections. It’s pretty fucked up.
However, perpetual abundance may lead to spoiled lunatics, but created abundance out of the ashes of utter devastation is what leads to Star Trek.
Having come from a seasonally moderated civilization, the creation of abundance leads more and more to the possibility of world peace.
When people know that privation not only sucks, but is a few failures away from being widespread at any given time, they actually appreciate the abundance that is facilitated by the hard work of others.
If those others are robots and AI manager brains and we become completely detached from the concept of necessary work, we could easily devolve into penis-gourd people. Just look at social media influencers.
☃️🎄🦌 Feelz 🎅🏻🥛🍪
I love the scents of winter! For me, it’s all about the feeling you get when you smell pumpkin spice, cinnamon, nutmeg, gingerbread and spruce. ~Taylor Swift
In order to live peacefully in abundance in the future, we’re going to have to come up with new cultural stories that explain how things work and how things could rapidly go to 💩 if we don’t all contribute to the upkeep and improvement of things overall.
In the last century or so, that’s been the role of scifi writers and armchair philosophers.
In the present day, anybody can jump in front of a camera or even record thoughts without a camera and post it for the world to see.
Some of that is utter nonsense, but it’s still entertaining to someone.
Some of that is kind of cool, and they gain a following.
Some of that is absolutely groundbreaking, and someone takes the concept and runs with it in practice.
We can all be world-famous if we say something worth hearing, but people being intentional in their posting is a trick that many haven’t quite developed a talent for or skill of.
This is where we really need people to start developing the kinds of stories I mentioned above. We need forward thinkers who help to normalize this new world of abundance.
The problem we’ve had over the last few decades is that there was a moment of genius in the 50s and 60s. A lot of original properties came up. Since then, because they were so good, people just want to rehash those great ideas.
We get remake after remake instead of new stories with new characters. It’s really frustrating and we’re all pretty done with it.
We need a new burst of genius with people creating original stuff that isn’t just a repackaging of something else that used to be popular.
When the market is set to reward cookie-cutter rehash, that’s what comes. We need to be on the lookout for fresh, new ideas that match this coming age of AI-driven abundance.
We need new ways of thinking about what life looks like in the new paradigm in order for people to be able to get on board with it.
Otherwise, we’re going to be a bunch of whiny buggy-whip craftsmen griping about why we’re not getting as much work as we used to.
Writers need to be the headlights on the vehicle of the future. The headlights need to be on the front of that car, not the back.
We need a realignment so writers can be prophets again. We want to build a Star Trek world, not a jungle full of penis-gourd idiots. We’ve had quite enough of that.
That’s all for today. Enjoy the new season. It brings us Christmas, New Year’s, the Super Bowl and all kinds of good wintry fun.