Midwinter

I feel uncannily like a priest in a traditional community going around knocking on doors for contributions to his upkeep at the first of the month, but this article and this time of year is an appropriate one to suggest that, if you like my writing enough, I am deeply grateful to everyone for the contributions that allow me to keep doing it. If you'd like to donate, either as a one-off or on an ongoing basis, you can do so here. There are bills to be paid soon, so contributions are particularly helpful now.

I write this on a grey, rainy and downright miserable midwinter's day. It's the shortest, darkest day of the year, and despite having only moved a meagre eight hundred kilometers south, the winter days here in Wellington feel notably darker than they did in Hamilton. As I tend towards the melancholic during the winter (I suspect I get quite bad Seasonal Affective Disorder, but honestly I'm also a little sick of pathologising what I'm pretty sure is a natural adaptation to life at high latitudes), my mood's been tending towards the dark end of things lately.

You know the kind of feeling: everything's dark, getting enough daylight, air or exercise is difficult because the wind and the rain are unremitting, you spend altogether too much time inside just... working. It's easy, in such circumstances, for everything to get very claustrophobic and if you're doing something difficult that takes long-term effort to pay off (the kind of thing that you often do in your work or your career, or in trying to start a business or write or something), it can be really hard to stay the course. After all, you're struggling now and try as you might, it's just work: nothing feels as though it's growing or making progress and you're just wearing yourself down more.

The usual solution to this is to take winter as a time when you work less, slow down, spend time with friends and family and generally rest. You can take time for contemplation, eat, drink and be merry, practice your faith and reconnect with friends, family and your community. Winter, historically, was also a time for maintenance work, when the damage and wear that the hard work of ploughing, planting and then the harvest inflicted on your home, your clothing and your equipment would be fixed. In general agricultural work (and all work) tends to happen in cycles: you have a period where work gradually ramps up, a period of extremely hard work for some period of time, a cleanup phase and then a period of low ebb wherein we rest, recover and put things back together. This gave us time to rest and recover capacity for the next tranche of work. So far as I can make out, this is how humans, when left to their own devices, tend to work, and as with sleep cycles, we mess with that at our peril.

Our modern economy does not allow us that grace. Between electricity, an economy that's ever less dependent on relentlessly seasonal industries like agriculture, construction and other primary industries and a cadence of life controlled more by finance than by productivity as such, there's no reason for an economy to slow down over the winter at all. Humans, however, haven't really adjusted: we're still very much tuned for seasonality. And it really shows.

On a personal level, the idea that we should be consistently productive throughout the year without having any slower period is fucking me up. In an ideal situation I'd probably spend most of the winter months alone in a cabin somewhere in Fiordland, catching cod, baking my own bread, writing when the mood takes me, reading and otherwise doing very little to interact with the outside world. This isn't just an "I don't want to work thing": in my line of work, where an awful lot of my economic well-being has to do with my being able to write well and think clearly and deeply, this would be obviously economically beneficial in a bunch of ways. Aside from anything else, just being able to write without having to think too much about economics can do an awful lot of good. Unfortunately, if I want to have the work and donations coming in to maintain minimally financially OK, that means that I have to keep writing, keep promoting, keep doing the sales work and all of that stuff (and quite frankly, I notice that there's a distinct drop in the quality of what I put out around this time of year, but alas, we needs must keep going). The situation was similar at work: I was amazingly good at getting out stuff through the spring and summer, and more than productive to make up for the winter slump, but the winter was all that anyone focused in on. So I had to push through, and well... the quality of work wasn't good there either.

The situation is particularly bad in the Southern Hemisphere, I suspect. For a bunch of reasons, mostly relating to colonialism, we follow the Northern Hemisphere calendar for our major holidays. That calendar, however, was calibrated mostly with Northern Hemisphere seasons in mind. This means that for those of us in New Zealand, we generally have to try and make it through almost the entire winter with no real holiday period or extended breaks: certainly we have a day or two as a public holiday, but there's not really anything that would allow for proper recuperation. We just have to push through the darkness and the miserable weather, working very hard all the time. After a few years of this, it's no wonder that a lot of us are downright burnt out: we have to push through things at precisely the times when our bodies are telling us to cuddle up under the covers with a hot chocolate and not be active for a while.

The unremitting pressure to do all of this is completely wrecking my health: I'm losing words mid-sentence, my displaced rib is flaring up even more seriously than usual, I generally feel like shit and I'm increasingly finding myself sleeping much later than I should be. I suspect it's doing this to a lot of other people as well. And honestly, I don't know what to say. The way that I've been conditioned while growing up tells me that to complain about working hard is churlish, but the value I bring is in how I can think, not in my ability to destroy my body doing physical labour (and that, for that matter, has also increasingly seen people being pushed well past what it's reasonable to expect of a human body). What this is all to say is that the way we organise our work simply isn't suited to how humans work, and this time of year is one of the times where that problem is most in evidence.

I suspect that for most of us, we deal with the problem by continuing in our patterns of quiet desperation until something happens that makes continuing just flat untenable. Whether it's an illness serious enough to just flat stop you from working no matter how much you might want to push through, some life event that breaks everything or a mental breakdown caused by the sheer weight of the stress you're working under, eventually we hit a point where we just can't keep pushing through and are forced to acknowledge, essentially, that it is winter, that trying to force more work to happen will do no good and that you just can't keep pushing any more.

And then... well, it can go a couple of ways. If you're lucky enough that you had savings to put aside, you might well be able to rest and recalibrate. If the economy is good, you can take on, potentially, a less taxing job that lets you recover while still working. If you were unlucky enough that you weren't able to build real stability before things fell apart for you and the economy is bad, you're kinda just screwed and have to figure out how to scrape by one way or another. In the worst case scenario, you might find yourself wiped out entirely and your life falling to pieces before your eyes, whatever that means for you. The world we live in at the moment is not kind to people who've pushed themselves to the point of breakdown and find themselves unable to continue any more. Perhaps a more human world, and one that understood that people can't function at full capacity all the time, would make better provision for the winters in peoples' years and in their lives, but right now we certainly don't.

The midwinter of our industry

All this, of course, was about the actual midwinter, you know, the one that we have every year. Looking wider, though, I think we can see a similar pattern at play in the wider tech industry: an enroaching midwinter that we're forced to ignore even as we see that pushing through it simply does damage. The mood of the tech industry at the moment, more than anything, is one of abject exhaustion. We are, by and large, out of new ideas for how to make the world better with tech and most of what we're doing at the moment seems to be finding new ways to extract more money from what we've already built. Tech workers are exhausted from having been ravaged by layoffs, tech fads and half a hundred other things, and those of us that still have work are for the most part reduced to following the idiotic diktats of some of the worst people on the face of the planet. Even investors are, by and large, exhausted by the consistent lack of new ideas or new thinking in the scene, and are desperately throwing money at LLMs in the hope that they'll find something, anything new and alive and exciting. About the only people who still seem excited by tech are the leaders, who are by and large too stupid to feel any of this exhaustion.

You can feel the weariness at any tech meetup you go to these days. People put a brave face on and try to pretend that they're still excited about tech, still innovating, still trying stuff... but the room feels tired more than anything. There are no new ideas in evidence, just half a hundred variants of the same conversation of how people are using AI to do... something. Even the current vogue of coding agents is, by and large, part of the same phenomenon: it's not that a lot of people don't care about code or writing good code or anything so much as they're exhausted with an industry where nothing they do matters, management jargon keeps changing arbitrarily, as do the fashions in the tech industry and the entire product that they maintain is, more than anything, an elaborate form of theatre to get money from the people who currently hold most of the wealth in tech.

Workplaces are similar: people smiling through dead eyes, doing the bare minimum that they need to give the appearance that they're doing what management wants, glad to have survived another day. Nobody talks about the empty seats or the people who just... aren't there any more. People prod the company-mandated LLM listlessly, not really caring about the outputs any more because after all, what's the point? Fighting will just get you thrown out. Things just drag on, one step at a time.

At this point, what the industry needs more than anything is a rest and for the pressure to produce to turn down. We are, for the moment, out of any real innovative ideas, and we've been running down the technological and social infrastructure that we need to support that kind of work. We need, as with any kind of winter, to slow down, do less new work, reinforce social connections and maintain and repair some of the social and technological damage that we've done by building so many new things. This might look like spending more time maintaining projects rather than starting new ones, settling on fewer, more robust technologies to build new things going forward... in general, doing the kinds of things that might present themselves once the industry has given up, for a while, on totalising, revolutionary projects such as social media and the development of smartphones (I think those were the last two totalising innovations of any real substance). Giving up on major or totalising inventions in general is, I think, the single most beneficial thing that we could do for the industry at the moment.

Unfortunately, the valuation of major tech companies, and the ideology that accompanies that, does not allow anyone to settle down and stop trying to innovate. Never mind the fact that the industry is exhausted, burnt-out and, for the moment, out of ideas: the market, the leaders and everyone in the grip of the ideology demands change, disruption and even more totalising innovations. So we beat on, ceaselessly trying to innovate or do something new, and the new things consistently turn out to be just plain bad.

Winters don't have to be a bad thing. I'd argue that the repeated AI winters tended to have a bigger impact on the fields of AI and machine learning than the scorching summers have: the work done during the down-times when the field was at its most unfashionable was some of the most productive, in fact. Similarly, while the Dotcom bubble ravaged the tech industry, the quiet, unfashionable work done in the aftermath of it was arguably what turned the internet into the genuinely useful technology that it mostly is these days. It doesn't have to ravage employment either, for that matter: there's more than enough maintenance work and smaller, more practical dev work out there to keep every dev alive busy, if it were only valued enough that people would pay for it. In a world where the industry could in some way co-ordinate on this outcome, winding down for the winter would be nothing if not a good idea.

The Red Queen's race that is the current state of the industry, however, means that this exhausted, thoughtless state that our industry is in will keep pushing for more totalising innovations even when we clearly aren't in a state to produce anything of the kind. Much as it goes with individual humans forced to work their asses off through winter with no respite, this will probably only end when something (a financial crash, say) makes continuing along the path actively impossible, and it'll probably cause similar kinds of human wreckage on a much wider scale.

Preparing for a hard winter

So, what's a girl to do, both with her own midwinter and the midwinter of the industry? There is, of course, no shortage of glib solutions out there, from mindfulness training, to self-care and treating your burnout, to yoga, to health supplements and all kinds of other things of that nature. While on a personal level these can be useful for maintaining the ability to function for long enough to change the situation, or to help ameliorate the intensity of the damage when things finally do break, they aren't really enough to address the issue. The flipside of this is to say that the problems of personal and societal midwinters are too complex and simply can't be fixed short of a massive, totalising revolution (you'll see here the mirror of the tech world's need for major, totalising innovations: it is, practically speaking, impossible to force either of those things to happen). The problem there, of course, is similar: perhaps we do need a revolution to deal with climate change, the resurgent far right, massive political instability, economic inequality and poverty and all of the other issues that plague our world, but all too often the idea of a revolution simply becomes eschatological. All will be better when the revolution happens, but until then the revolutionary still has no answers for how to make the world work well enough, at least in the here and now.

This is mostly because, in addition to the usual elements needed for survival (food, clothing, shelter, energy), humans have a deep-seated need to make sense of their world in terms of stories, and to give their lives some meaning, or something they're working towards. To survive periods of winter, then, we need, not only to have the exigencies of life (though these are very important), but also to be able to tell ourselves a story about what's happening. We do that through the northern hemisphere winter, after all: Christmas, Yule celebrations and all of these things are, as much as anything else, stories: God comes down from heaven and is born in Bethlehem to save us, or we've burnt a fire, slaughtered a pig and sacrificed to the Gods and now the sun will start coming back again. If we're going to survive, we need to find stories that we can tell that will give us a point of meaning to hope for in a situation where midwinter sets in but the Trofim Lysenkos of the modern world (Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, you get the idea) insist on professing that it's still the height of summer. I don't know exactly how that might work, but here are some threads I've been holding onto.

A common theme I see coming up (in, among other places, some of Adrian Lambert's work on systems collapse: I don't know how much I agree with the gestalt of his argument, but still, there's good stuff in there) is that as systems degrade, the more forward-thinking people involved in a system tend to reorient towards preserving skills that might not be useful in the current situation, but that will likely be of considerable value when things finally do break. Lambert writes more in the context of society in general, but it's worth specifically thinking about tech and what will be required should the current period of exuberance properly sink here. In that case, skills like Linux systems administration, basic networking, the ability to write and host websites using basic technologies (HTML, CSS, maybe a little JavaScript, PostgreSQL), a strong understanding of low level languages such as C and this whole family of skills suddenly become quite important. Learning how to host something on the internet without some kind of managed service or Kubernetes, and ideally on a box in your office, might also be of great value.

Similarly, turning one's mind from the work of building new things to the work of repair is a common response: in the times when things temporarily die back and in times of retreat and contraction, the work of repairing what we already have and keeping it available as long as possible becomes important. This can mean maintaining existing software that's useful and keeping it usable, even when that's hard. It can mean writing software to work on old and outdated systems, or maintaining those systems themselves and getting as much life out of them as we can. This is valuable and important work, and importantly, with both this point and the previous point you can tell quite a compelling story about: Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz and Neal Stephenson's Anathem both play in this space, with monastics keeping knowledge alive through one form of societal collapse or another. In one case it's nuclear war, and in another it's (I assume conventional) bombs, pornography and sugar water, but the principle remains the same: dedicating yourself to the preservation of knowledge and the repair and maintenance of what's been built during times of collapse is hnourable work and makes for a good story.

Getting through harsh winters or periods of contraction isn't something you can do alone, either. Yule and Christmas are, as much as anything, times to spend with family, friends and your community, and whether that's your biological family, a chosen/found family or a more formal organisation, we rely heavily on each other to make it through the dark and the cold. You'll also note that the examples mentioned above have, in times such as these and both historically and in fiction been done by communities of monastics: the lone hermit, oddly enough, does not come up much in stories of how our knowledge of the classics was preserved. In short, where financial capital is in short supply, social capital must serve, and winter is best survived in community rather than alone. For those of us in tech, this means looking at surviving in unorthodox ways and ones that we can support each other in as much as each of us trying to survive on our own. We can share resources to create spaces where people can do valuable work that might not otherwise have been done at all: whatever the next iteration of the open-source community will look like might operate on that logic. Part-time work and tech work in non-traditional community spaces can also be a life-saver: while your local community organisations might not be able to pay the same kinds of salary that Google might, the work is important, the pace of it might be a little more reasonable and you will be strengthening the community ties that, in the end, we all need to lean on to survive times like these.

You'll notice that I've been working in quite a few of these spaces of late, as I find it increasingly difficult to pretend everything's fine in an industry and a world where it really, really isn't. My teaching has focused precisely on these kinds of maintenance and knowledge preservation skills: knowing statistics, knowing how to stand up a server by yourself and all of these other skills will become increasingly important in a tech industry that's falling apart at the seams while still desperately trying to innovate more, and in writing I aim to contribute to the community of people who notice that there's something deeply broken about the way the world is at the moment. In doing so, I'm able to tell myself a story about my struggles and my feelings both at this time of year and in the industry in its current state that I think may well have kept me alive. I can highly recommend doing it as well, I think.

All of the winters I've discussed are harsh, and are liable to be made harsher by the persistence of people in telling us to push through them and pretending that the winter isn't actually happening at all. Surviving them is genuinely hard. All things, though, are cyclical, and winter, in whatever form, is followed by a new spring. Our job right now is not to grow or to bloom, but to survive, repair, pull together as our community and preserve what we can until we see the new shoots poking through the cracked and broken ground.