Humans acclimatize to conditions very quickly, which is why I tell my wife not to put on a jacket too early in the autumn, otherwise she will freeze all winter, because she will have trained her body to consider it cold, when it was actually pretty warm.
She doesn't listen to me.
The last few days I have been reading from the Australian news that people are "freezing" as they work from home in unbearable conditions. The above image is the weather from Sydney and there today, it is going to be warmer than it was for midsummer in Finland last weekend.
It is all relative.
But, acclimatization is a funny thing, because it conditions our expectations as well, which is how we end up with such an incredible sense of entitlement. For instance, in the paragraph above I italicized "work from home", as this is something that most of the same people now complaining about the cold, was adamant they wanted to do. After Covid stupidity of lockdowns, they have become accustomed to not wearing pants at their desk and said they won't return to the office. The commute is too long, they work just as well from home, they don't get paid enough to go to the office... whatever.
Turn on your heater.
Oh... you can't afford it. Cost of living pressures and the price of the coffee you ordered and paid to have delivered to your door, has made turning on the radiator too expensive. The overheads are too high. And now, you are considering going back to work, because at least there, the company pays for heat.
The irony.
People complaining about the cost of working from home, after fighting for the right to do so, not caring about the overheads for a company in rent, electricity, and heating that they have to pay whether people are in the office or not.
I know what it is like to work in a cold room, because this last winter, in the weeks while the new office was in changeover with the old, I worked from home. It was -30C outside, our heating failed and with everything that could give off heat on in the house, it was 8C degrees inside. That was in the warmer areas. At floor level, it was 4C.
Working in the cold sucks.
But at the same time, I also think that people are becoming so "climate controlled" that the bands of variation we can deal with are narrowing. I remember getting into a car in the summer where it was seventy or more degrees, winding down the window and driving away - with no air-conditioning. And growing up in an old farmhouse, parts of the house were very cold for weeks on end, like the bathroom, and the tiled floors numbed the toes.
But, that was normal.
These days, where everything is adjustable and on-demand, we have developed oversensitivity to variation, and are unable to cope with change. It presents in many ways of course, but I see people complaining about having to wait two seconds for a page to load, or 15 seconds for their PC to startup. I hear people complaining about the food they are served, even though the same food twenty years ago would have been considered incredibly good. And of course, the comparison of everything to the best known form of it, so that nothing compares, nothing holds up to the judgement.
People have low tolerance levels.
It seems to pervade everything these days, where people can't even hear a wide range of words without becoming triggered. Triggered isn't even the right word for it anymore, perhaps injured, maimed, or traumatized are better descriptors. An image of a fit person is abusive to the unfit, because it makes them feel bad about their own condition. It is like we have to pad and censor the world like an insane asylum, because everything is considered dangerous to someone, a weapon, or just a spiky bit that they might cut themselves upon. We are conditioned to be soft.
The weather can be undesirable. Things break. Food can taste bad. Traffic jams happen. Orders are wrong. Words get said. Mistakes are made. Jobs can suck. Bosses can be dicks. People can let you down.
Harden the fuck up.
Life can get a lot worse. And while that sounds like a pithy statement, the softer we make ourselves the worse things are going to get because we have conditioned our selves to be delicate, fragile, soft, and thin-skinned. We used to work barefoot through forests, across deserts, and over glaciers - now we can't even stand being a bit cool in the relative comfort of our own homes, surrounded by all the gadgets we have bought to make our lives more convenient and to entertain us - yet we can't afford to turn on the heater.
We are accustomed.
We are consumers.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]