Seasonal Blues and How to Solve Them!

Welcome back to the wasteland!

With the end of August there's usually a lot of nonsense one needs to fight through to get back to stability again. I'm not sure why exactly this is the case, but it 100% always seems to be how it is. It oddly isn't just a thing for children and teenagers having to readjust to school again after losing their precious summer vacation. Even as an adult the seasonal change still is in effect, regardless of your occupation. There is a sort of lingering panic affecting everything from coworkers to higherups, forcing a mood that doesn't quite settle until the weather itself does.

We're all waiting for fall, essentially.

This also leads us to point to a strange feeling in the modern world, especially with the internet, in how the seasons all seem to last longer than they used to, even though time passes faster the older you get. A lot of people wonder just how that seems to be the case. Is it just fighting the passing of time, or is there something else there?

Well, the main reason we do this is that we're trying to subconsciously competing with a world that wants us to be faster than we can actually be. Seasons become longer because we're simply not allowed to enjoy them as they are anymore. Whether it is due to loss of local community and family or a culture that continually presses for more materialism and less meditation, the end result is that it is always over before we even realize it began and we're on to the next thing already.

This is the real reason Christmas music plays in November, people begin outwardly yearning for Spring at the start of February, and why a lot of people begin preparing for Halloween around Labor Day. They want to get into a mindset longer than they're socially allowed to have it, and in a society of alienation there is really no reason not to do it. Not to mention that if they don't, they barely get to celebrate it before it's over and we're on to the next thing.

The fact of the matter is that the world moves too fast now. It's been moving faster and faster with less and less care for how it effects the populace for quite some time now. We already don't have enough connection with each other as we used to and there is little means for us to fix it with how we currently operate. The way things are isn't enough to satiate us as social animals, so we look to solutions to this endless issue.

If you want a real solution it is to have more holidays in the year that mean something. I don't mean obviously cynical ones like Valentine's Day or even a one day event like St Patrick's Day. Without a monoculture, the few holidays we have are the few times we feel like we belong to a greater whole anymore. If we want to savor that feeling, well, all we can really do is extend the biggest ones we already have with us. We'll never agree on a new one with the current fractured state of things. This is why Halloween and Christmas in particular are the holidays that last the longest. They're feasibly the only ones we can stretch out longer beyond the day everyone accepts socially.

And, to be honest, I don't really understand the complaints about it. It isn't like you're doing anything else in the meantime except living through another generic day that seems to blur from one to the next. What does having a longer season to celebrate really take away from that? Nothing, really. It's just a residue of the anti-social instinct we've had implanted in us as acceptable for literal decades at this point.

Having the autumn season be a build up to spooky season gives it more for us to do amidst the doldrums of returning to school for kids or getting over the jarring completion from the hot summer season to the mild one adults go through. Halloween is so tightly tied with the autumn season and falling of the leaves that it makes sense that people would get in the mood for it ahead of time, much like Christmas is so tied with winter. We need more to look forward to beyond just another day doing what we already do.

However, I would agree with the idea that hopping from holiday to holiday is exhausting. Christmas not beginning immediately after October 31st is a good thing, we do need space to anticipate it, but the holiday also isn't supposed to end on December 25th, either. And yet for as long as I've been alive, it has not extended into the worst month of the year (January) like it is supposed to and where it would add a lot to an otherwise nothing month where literally nothing happens except cold and everyone being miserable and sick. Would Christmas being properly celebrated not help make that lousy month better from all the cold, snow, dreary feelings, and nothing happening in it? Would it also not help to have a proper holiday to anticipate after it to look forward to? It isn't as if there are many holidays to actually build up to in the first half of the year before Lent, either. Perhaps that should also be addressed. Three months of cold and nothing else isn't exactly healthy for anyone.

As the above video states, there is probably some crass commercialism involved here, but it's almost irrelevant to the discussion. The stores stock every season much too early but most people don't pay them any mind except to complain about it. The only ones that regularly get the complaints are Halloween and Christmas, as it's usually due to people not wanting to be part of the social fabric including those anymore, as if that isn't a key problem with the way things are and why they're being pushed more and more as a consequence. September and October leading to Halloween, and Christmas centered on December through January (it should be the start of February, traditionally, but no one wants to have that conversation yet) is about a quarter of the year where we could potentially act like a society that appreciates and shares the same general experience, and deep down that is what the majority actually wants, but we make no moves to do it.

That is what we had long ago, and what everyone still craves. We might not have celebrated those holidays as much back then, but that is also because we were tied together more tightly for the rest of the year. We don't have that bond anymore, and it is why the masters in charge downplay both holidays every year while the rest of us have been ramping them up more and more these days in the opposite direction. In a sense they are a few of the things we still have left and losing them, or choosing to opt out these days, in a sense is saying you're done with the social contract. If that is what you want then don't be surprised when things don't improve when they're finally gone. Because they most definitely will not, nor will anything pop up in their place.

Of course there are also those that take every season and make it about themselves. You've seen it yourself. The decorations, the costumes, the events, all made to make the person organizing them the winner in some competition in their mind, to put them above everyone else, something only exacerbated by social media. Those who engage in this tend to cheapen the experience and make folks more cynical about the season and what it's for, but the key isn't to abandon the season: it's to make said people know this isn't how things are supposed to be done, and how to make it better. You don't abandon stolen ground, you reclaim it instead. We've spent too much time just ceding everything instead of fighting for any of it.

We still need that connection. It isn't going to go away, no matter how much we downplay it or think we're above it. In fact, that desire for belonging has only increased in recent years. Deep down, we know what we want.

Memories matter, but so do shared cultural memories that the wider populace is able to have together. We're having less and less of those the further we get into the 21st century, and we need to do something to fight against it, even if it's working with what we already have fumbled. We need to do something drastic before we lose it all, because that is the only alternative future ahead of us besides reclaiming what we lost. There is no better alternative coming.

It's either preserve and build, or lose it all. That's it. This starts locally and personally, as all change does. Create what you want to see and promote it as wide as you can. Support others, don't sabotage, and push the most obvious and simple changes you can. That's the only feasible solution to combatting decay and atomization. We need to create what we want to see.

So let's create! That's what we're here for, after all.

That's all for August, ladies and gentlemen! We'll soon be leaving summer behind for more colorful skies to come.

Until September, have yourself a good end of the month!

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