Some foundations of Western cultural unseasonality: An introduction to seasonal living

First of all, thank you to everyone who has completed the google form to state their preference for the salon date.

We’ll be meeting Sunday, February 2nd at 5pm Atlantic Standard Time. If you’d like to join us please go to this google form to submit your email address.

Before we gather for the salon I was hoping to publish an essay where I discuss seasonality at this life stage, what it looks like for me, how I want to develop it in my life, etc.

I’ve been working on that since December but the process was inviting me to go deeper than “here’s how I’m trying to live seasonally”.

So I wrote a bit about the philosophical and economic influences in Western culture, the context I live in and suspect most of you do also, that have helped create fundamentally unseasonal structures and systems in our society.

I don’t know if I’ll have time to finish the whole essay before the salon so I’m going to publish that first part today as the introduction.

What’s interesting about this is that a salon was historically an intellectual social gathering and although I don’t want to over-intellectualize our discussion, I am quite happy about the opportunity to bring some philosophy and cultural context to the table.

I would love to hear your own big ideas, and even disagreements with mine, about the cultural conditions in which we live and build our lives, and how that all relates to seasonal living, if you are so inclined. And if you are inclined, come to the salon this Sunday!

And now onto the introduction.


If you are my vintage - mid-lifer, Gen X - you might notice that as younger generations talk about seasonality or seasonal living, it’s like they are discovering the idea for the first time.

I watch a fair bit of YouTube, and many of those content creators are younger than me, in some cases, by decades. Watching their videos, I am surprised that seasonal living is still being talked about as some newly discovered counter-cultural aspiration.

In my cynical moments (not proud of it), I roll my eyes and think there really is nothing new under the sun.

Is this how the hippie-inclined and the OG back-to-landers thought about our early to mid-aughts musings on simple and green living?

(PS. If you are a millennial or Gen Z’er, my apologies, I don’t want to be “that” older person with the “been there, done that” attitude.)

Here’s my point: There is a perennial interest in the topic of seasonality. And the fact that the topic has been part of the cultural discourse, or at least at the edges of popular media, for at least two decades is a little mind-boggling to me.

How have I been talking about this for twenty years already?!

But here we are twenty years later, still talking about it!

I’ve been trying to orient my life in a seasonal direction for a long time now.

It’s not something I’ve achieved to the extent I want. And there are serious limitations on my ability to lean wholly into this philosophy, not to mention impracticality and near impossibility.

When we’re talking about seasonality, at the far end of that spectrum, we’re talking about a very non-modern life, since the whole point of modernity was to move humans past our seasonal dependency and the limitations of seasons in our lives.

Humans have successfully innovated to move our species past the vagaries, uncertainty, inconveniences, and insecurities of actual seasonal living. From electricity (light at non-light hours) to the birth control pill (giving women control over the seasonality of our fertility) to the globalization of food production and distribution (allowing us to eat everything at any time) - many (most?) humans are quite far removed from seasonality at this point.

So when people (when I) talk about seasonal living, it’s important to recognize all this. For most of us, what we’re talking about is window dressing on structurally non-seasonal lives, where the unseasonality is baked into everything from our homes to our bureaucracies. Everything can happen at all times. And most of us depend on it being this way.

The whole point of modernity was to move us out of seasonality. And in the arc of human history, our ability to live and survive independently of the seasons is very new.

I am deeply appreciative of many aspects of the modern world. Unlike some adherents to a seasonal living philosophy and practice, I don’t want to live in an earlier time. I don’t want to live without electricity or access to hormonal birth control. (The last time I was on hormonal birth control, I was 22 years old, so I’m not talking personally here, but societally.)

It’s not that I want to be “out” of the current time. I just want to make this time better. And for me, a better life is more tuned in to seasonal rhythms, whether in my own body or the natural world around me.

First, a little philosophy.

Seasonality can be framed in multiple ways. One is as a recognition of limits. (If you’re joining our salon I would love to hear how you frame it!)

Our culture, with its foundations in liberal philosophy, a political and ethical framework emphasizing individual freedom, equality, and human rights (good things), struggles with limits.

The law circumscribes our freedoms (these freedoms change over time), and other laws enshrine those freedoms, but outside a legal framework, liberalism’s emphasis on always advancing the individual’s rights challenges the establishment and preservation of agreed-upon cultural guardrails for society.

The guardrails change as society changes, but a liberal society values progress and continually tests the limits, pushing the guardrails.

The tendency to want to preserve and maintain, i.e., conserve the guardrails or limits, is the core impulse of conservatism. My use of the word conservatism is not about adherence to a particular set of ideas (that you might associate with conservative politics, for example); it’s about upholding things as they are; it’s a position that maintains the status quo.

(We attach judgements to many words based on their cultural usage. Status quo simply means the existing state of affairs. It takes on negative connotations when the existing state of affairs is negative. My view is that the desire to maintain a status quo is not in itself an ideological problem or a “bad” position. It depends on what the status quo is.)

Pure liberalism contrasts a conserving position which honours and seeks to maintain limits.

Let’s add a few more philosophical concepts.

In addition to the rise of liberalism, the modern age (historically speaking, we are past the “modern” period) was when rationalism and dualism, as well as other philosophies, strongly influenced Western culture.

Rationalism is the view that reason is the source of knowledge or that the intellect alone can discover knowledge. It stands in contrast to empiricism, which holds that our interactions with the world reveal knowledge.

Dualism is the view that reality is composed of and can be reduced to binary elements or two fundamentally distinct ideas. Some examples are mind/body, material/spiritual, feminine/masculine, reason/emotion, and humans/nature.

Dualism paired with liberalism contributes to humans seeing themselves outside of, superior to, and opposed to nature. Nature is a limit we need to push against in order to progress.

Rationalism encourages us to intellectualize the world and to know it in our minds. When paired with dualism, a hierarchy is created where head or mind knowledge takes precedence over the body and nature.

Put the three together, and you get a worldview or orientation where humans are superior to nature, know better than nature, and are encouraged to push past our bodies and nature’s limits as progress demands.

Gosh, I haven’t even talked about capitalism. I don’t know enough philosophy, economics, and history to know if rationalism, dualism, and liberalism were the building blocks for capitalism or if the ideas emerged concomitant with capitalism’s rise.

What I do know is that capitalism operates from the philosophy of humans being separate from, superior to, and knowing better than nature. In a capitalist economy, we are not part of nature; we extract from nature for our material benefit. Capitalism, paired with the liberal tendency to push the guardrails, has moved humans to production and consumption levels beyond the planet’s sustainability limits.

Individuals and societies do not live according to pure philosophy where social, political, economic, and ecological actions are easily quantified and categorized. All of this is muddied in practice and application. However, our post-modern Western society is what it is due to the influence and the inheritance of these philosophies in all aspects of our culture. (Ideas matter.)

The amalgam of worldview, philosophies, and the economy that drives Western culture is the structure I’m speaking of when I say:

So when people (when I) talk about seasonal living, it’s important to recognize all this. For most of us, what we’re talking about is window dressing on structurally non-seasonal lives, where the unseasonality is baked into everything from our homes to our bureaucracies. Everything can happen at all times. And most of us depend on it being this way.

Seasonal living is about limits. It’s about recognizing ourselves as part of nature. I’ve just laid down the philosophical basis for why this is counter-cultural.

Seasonal living is sometimes framed as a radical act, I’m reminded here of the book Radical Homemakers. In some ways, it feels both radical and reactionary. It’s a reaction to the societal consequences of particular philosophies, including liberalism, dualism, and rationalism. It’s a pushback against a capitalist economy that demands unrelenting growth.

It’s radical in taking us back to the root, where we understand ourselves as nature.

Seasonal living is a conserving position. It honours nature’s limits and says these are the guardrails; we push them at our own peril.

(And pushing our limits is how humanity has made many gains and created conditions for human well-being and flourishing. Both are true.)

We live in a culture dismissive of limits, owing in part to its liberal foundation, but nature is still seasonal and imposes some limits on us. Thank Goddess.

To be continued…


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