Winter's Work
On Depression
I. Night
First consider sleep.
Why do we sleep?—a vague question with many answers. Here’s one: we sleep because we’re tired. It’s as simple as that.
There’s a famous saying in Zen:
When you're hungry, eat; when you're tired, sleep.
It is at once good to sleep when you’re tired; it is beneficial to sleep when you’re tired; you will tend to sleep when you’re tired; you should sleep when you’re tired; when you sleep it will be because you are tired. These are all saying the same thing.
Why do we sleep? Another answer: because it’s night-time. After all, a human being under typical conditions will tend to sleep at night. To sleep at night is what is good for us, it is what is beneficial, it is what you should do, etc.
Why do we sleep? We can read this instead as asking: how did it come to be that we sleep? Most species sleep, even very simple ones, and it's easy to imagine the sleep cycle arising very early in evolutionary history as the restorative process for some early biological system (a proto-nervous system, perhaps), which then would have supplied an obvious "scheduled downtime" into which to cram other restorative functions. By the time you arrive at homo sapiens’ level of complexity, you’d expect to see the same sleep cycle serving many biological functions at once.
...and it does. Now we arrive at another sense: what is the function of sleep? A skim over the book "Why We Sleep"1 is sufficient to sketch the answer. We see a long list of disorders associated with sleep deprivation—heart attacks, cancer, dementia, loss of libido, a weakened immune system, psychosis, learning disorders, emotional dysregulation, hypersensitivity, and plain incompetence. The function of sleep then, is what it does: it prevents all of those things.
A number of these functions can be summed as one: sleep gives the mind the opportunity to process new information. Short-term memories are converted to long-term, problems are “slept on”, and one's internal model of the world is updated and refined. It being 2025, I can't help but think of everything in terms of AI: sleep is the occasion for the daily "fine-tuning" step of one's mental "model". Dreams in particular look like AI "hallucinations”, which are allowed to play out safely in the sandbox of sleep; perhaps allowing our thoughts to wander where they like helps to build long-range associations or to cull nonsensical connections; in any case dreaming presumably helps the mind operate in the daytime, or, it’s purely a side-effect of our cognitive architecture. In any case, it would clearly be perilous to dream so freely while awake—better to cordon off your straying thoughts.
There does not, however, appear to be any hard requirement that we perform the daily upkeep of the mind perfectly on schedule. When circumstances demand it we will readily stay up late and pay a cost later—here I think of posting a watch in prehistoric times, or finishing an urgent project in the present day. Here we find an answer to a different question: why don’t we sleep?
Now to muddy the water. Sometimes the mental-processing requirements of the mind themselves require that we don’t sleep. Not all processing can be carried unconsciously. When our minds are riddled with anxiety, say, we might find ourselves awake for hours, thoughts racing, trying to solve the puzzle of our own lives. Instead we need to talk about our feelings, or at least to think about them.
This processing too appears to prefer to occur at night. Is it not the most natural thing in the world for a child to be "tucked in" to bed, and to say what’s on their mind? Such is the rhythm of young life: before sleep—conversation. On a happy day we read books, tell stories, or sing songs, but if there are negative feelings in the air, then the tucking-in is the time to talk about them.
When I was in my twenties it was a rather common occurrence for a group of friends, when hanging out late into the evening, to experience a sudden drop of our daytime guardedness after which our inner monologues would being to spill forth. We’d vent our grievances and share (or over-share) experiences, as if comparing notes on the firsthand experiences of life.I came to calling these mid-night episodes “Candor Hour”. Candor Hour would occur quite regularly whenever we stayed up past our bedtimes (not so late as the "Witching Hour", though). By the end of the day the walls of the mind must have grown quite thin. Whatever was concealed within would become visible for all to see.
I conclude that the processing of feelings is what the night is "for" according to our human natures. The rhythm of the child being tucked-in never really leaves us. The wise know: to take a grievance to bed is a mistake. We advise newlyweds to "never go to bed angry". To feel, to vent, to resolve oneself, to grieve—all make up the "Night's Work", a counterpart to daily labor.
But the two demands of nighttime—sleep, processing—get in each other’s way. How should you decide which to undertake? Well, it’s simple: when you’re tired, sleep; when you’re thoughtful, think. This of course cannot be a complete answer; sometimes you must wake up early. But for the most part, your body has already prioritized its competing interests by the time they reach your attention. You only have to trust it and to grant what it asks of you (this I take to be the way of Zen). Done well, you (your mind) will earn trust in turn by clearing your schedule for whatever it is you (your body) needs.
If you don't sleep, all kinds of things go wrong. I listed a few above, but the obvious one is simply fatigue—the need for sleep persists and grows until it is unresistable. What happens if you don't process your feelings? Something similar: the feelings persist and grow, eventually to take over your whole life. To continually take grievances to bed surely makes for an angry person—over-reactive, defensive, nervous. Unpursued desires will leave you feeling scattered or knotted or sludgy, as energy and willpower arise from emotions cohering into a strong signal in a single direction. And if you haven’t decided what to do about the shame or guilt of your own mistakes, you’ll keep making them; that or you’ll hole up and hide. Etc. Ignore the Night’s Work at your own peril.2
Candor Hour, Night’s Work: these set our stage. Take note of the shape of the argument. Sleep and emotional processing are good for us and are necessary to survive and thrive. Tiredness and feelings then appear as the desires for these good things, as the information by which we learn what we need, and also as symptoms of deprivation. Each will tend to arise at a certain and natural point in the daily rhythm of life, so long as we don’t fall behind. But if we don’t respect these basic drives they will become more pressing and disruptive until they become unavoidable.
And would it would be rather insane to view “tiredness” as a pathology and to try to treat it with medicine? Or—to choose to prioritize sleep only on rational grounds by scientifically measuring the consequences of not sleeping? Life is quite a bit simpler than this: when you're tired—sleep!
II. The Winter Of Our Discontents
Now consider winter—the night-time of the year, so to speak. If the processing of emotion is "Night's Work", what is "Winter's Work"?
Here is my hypothesis: “Winter’s Work” is the processing of the year’s accumulated burden of trauma. The drive to do so will appear as a seasonal depression, as a drive towards downtime analogous to tiredness. Along the lines of my answer to why we sleep, above: depression in this view represents at once the need to take downtime, as the desire for it, as a tendency towards it, and as an affliction which sufficient downtime will “cure”.
The sought-after downtime, in this view, is a kind of "dry-docking" of the mind within which one’s beliefs can be safely dismantled and restructured to assimilate the year’s experiences, while free from the immediate demands of survival. Non-seasonal depression3 then could be explained as arising when the mind falls behind on this regular maintenance, somewhat akin to “sleep deprivation” on an annual timescale. More on this in a little while.
The analogy to sleep and emotional-processing is rich but is a obscured somewhat by the broadness of the word “depression”. To be specific: physiological depressiveness—the sluggishness which seems to drive the depressed towards a state of inactivity—is here the analog of “tiredness”, while depressive “brooding” plays the role of those feelings which we might use the night-time to process, either alone in insomnia, or with others in “Candor Hour”. The state of aimless inactivity which the depressed tend towards, then, is a kind of analog of “sleep” itself; in some cases this may even act like a seasonal hibernation.
I’ll call this the “Winter’s Work” theory of depression—depression as a counterpart to the regular work of life; as a fallow season in our nature. I’ll give some arguments as to why it might be true, but I won’t try to prove it scientifically. I doubt it is really novel. Instead I want to follow its logical and moral implications for some distance, because it seems to me that it says quite a lot.
The basic argument is from evolution: in an ancestral-human environment there would be little to do in the winter except to tuck-in and conserve energy. If we assume that trauma is cognitively costly in the long-term, and that trauma can be healed or repaired to some extent by downtime processes (maybe time simply healing wounds, but perhaps something more active, akin to Candor Hour), and that these healing processes are disruptive to one's ability to participate in labor (or labor is disruptive to healing), then the winter would present the ideal opportunity to undertake such a restorative process.4
Then a "computational" argument: if we model the human mind as a computer algorithm or AI, it follows that evolution would have optimized it, if imperfectly, for its long-term survival, while being constrained in various ways due to the underlying biological architecture. In particular, conscious decision-making is comparatively slow and cannot really be performed at the same time as the rapid and reactive cognition that keeps us safe from threats; fight-or-flight, after all, will kick in before you even know what is happening.
"Trauma" can then be roughly said to be what occurs when a threatening event exceeds this mind-computer's capacity to safely process it in real-time. The memories of the experience are instead cordoned off from conscious awareness, so that normal functioning can continue and short-term survival can be prioritized. Meanwhile, the intense emotions in those buried memories will fuel trigger reactions which serve to reactively and pre-consciously avoid threats. The aim of this design is to prioritize short-term safety at any cost without necessarily having processed the memories fully. But these reactions of course would also look like PTSD symptoms and would be expected to be suboptimal in various ways: costly, shameful, dangerous, or ineffective.
The mind might also try to process the buried memories while still operating normally. We should expect this to occur incrementally, with fragments circulating in a loop into conscious awareness, where they can be made-sense-of and correlated with each other, with the eventual aim of dissipating the fear. This I think of as having the character of working on a jigsaw puzzle: you sort through the scattered pieces and occasionally find matches, but is a slow process, and islands of sense can take a long time to appear. From the inside this would feel anxiety.
In summary: human nature uses the trauma response to prioritize its short-term safety (via the low-level triggers) while learning towards safety in the long-term (via anxiety). Trauma would therefore come with a long-term cognitive burden, which itself can be disruptive to life by causing more problems with their own cognitive burdens; a feedback loop ensues. While there is a continuum between "regular life hardship", "trauma", and "capital-T Trauma", the operative feature of "trauma" for my purposes is the potential for a runaway cognitive burden, whatever the cause.
All of this is exactly what you would come up with if you had to "design" the human mind around an inherent inability to process its experiences quickly. The apparent design goal is to function as well as possible even in a degraded state, while simultaneously seeking a state safety in which to eventually repair the damage. This actually resembles a standard pattern in software architecture, in which data processing is duplicated between a fast-but-inaccurate real-time system and a slow-but-expensive offline system. Anxiety and triggers represent the "fast path", with the healing of trauma as the "slow path", with seasonal depression acting as a sort of "scheduled downtime" for the mind.5
If our trauma-healing mechanisms are in fact synchronized to the seasons, it is quite plausible that this synchronicity would be thrown off by modern patterns of life and by our dispersion around the globe. It is also plausible that we would not notice a few missed healing-seasons here and there—even in an evolutionary environment, the work of providing for yourself would always come first. But the likely consequence of skipping maintenance would be an elevated rate of random and hard-to-explain failures (like a car you don't take care of), an accumulation of signals that you need to take downtime (like warning lights, suspicious sounds, etc.), a loss of efficiency, a fragility which risks permanent damage, etc.—all which sound quite a bit like a description of depression.
One question arises: are our bodies even so aware of the seasons? The existence of seasonal depression itself is some evidence for this. But furthermore, people in cold climates will tend to switch to a brown fat metabolism in the winter, which provides more heat for less energy.67 I don’t think it’s a stretch to conclude that the body knows the season—to some extent and in some climates, at least.8
Notice that when "seasonal depression" is arrived at by this route it differs considerably in sense from usual usage. This is depression not as an affliction, nor even as a defect in our nature, but as a purposeful repair process which arises predictably from the architecture of the mind. The mind needs to heal trauma, and it happens to schedule this at certain times of the year—counteract it at your peril!
What would go wrong if you don't take the downtime you need? A mind burdened by trauma will decline in attentiveness, intellect, openness, willpower, and happiness—almost everything would be affected, much like to sleep deprivation. These degradations would in turn have various adverse effects on one's life, which if unmitigated might spiral into a full breakdown—the non-seasonal sort of depression, perhaps. Again with the computer analogies: if you skip too many scheduled downtimes you'll eventually have an unscheduled downtime with near certainty—a full outage; a breakdown.
A bit more speculatively: a burden of unprocessed trauma below the level which would spiral into full depression might instead produce a failure to mature and thrive properly. In such a state a person would always feel like they aren't living up to their full potential, because in fact they are not, because some part of them is preoccupied with the past and unable to attend to present. They might seem to sleep-walk or coast through life, rather than ever engaging fully, and might be overly concerned with short-term validation—addictive behavior—and risk-avoidance. Long-term plans would be unthinkable, as the future would be felt to lie on the far side of the unknown of the healing process. They will seem to be indefinitely biding their time for some unnameable salvation; in fact they are waiting to heal.
Note how much of this argument runs exactly parallel to the argument about night. We take out a debt throughout the day/year and then are driven to pay it off in night/winter. This is something like a rationalization of the "life is cyclic" flavor of spiritual insight: self-repairing systems will tend to exhibit cyclic behaviors under some reasonable assumptions on their architectures, because the replenishment of any resource, whether restocking neurotransmitters or repairing damage, will require switching to a different "mode of operation" some of the time. Periodic downtime, fallow seasons: these are characteristic of life itself. A kind of “Dao of dynamical systems” reveals itself.9
This all very tidy, but it isn't at all clear how a seasonal depression is actually supposed to heal trauma. I won't take on that question now. Instead I want to take the "Winter's Work" theory for granted, and to ask what follows—what should we expect to see if this is true? What would be the consequences of clinging to our normal ideas of depression? And what, in any case, should we do about it?
III. Ours Is Not To Reason Why
Under the "Winter's Work" theory, what should we call the "cause" of seasonal depression? Is it winter itself? The cold, the climate? The low-light? The lack of vitamin D due to the low light? The social isolation, or lack of physical activity? Or is it a "chemical imbalance" in the brain? Genes upstream of any of these?
In a strict sense all of these are "causes" of depression, but the sense of “cause” is all scrambled from the usual one. Winter, light, cold, vitamin D, climate, and chemical imbalances would all lie on the biological pathway which triggers the depression—but if the depression is actually helping you, this is a good thing! Genes could affect the whole pathway, but in the present view we might prefer to see a person who is genetically predisposed to seasonal depressions as actually being adapted to the cold. Physical inactivity, to the body, might be taken as a signal that one's labor is not needed, permitting it to indulge its need for downtime. Social isolation could be placed causally upstream or downstream of healing: you wouldn't want to heal the mind while actively using it, and you wouldn't want to use it while healing it, rather like an injured limb, and particularly so if the social environment is emotionally unsafe, which, for the depressed, it often is.
If the purpose of the question is to figure out what to do about depression, then the answer is "none of the above". Instead the obvious "cause" is the trauma.
Even this is inadequate: some amount of trauma is expected in the course of life, and the cause of any particular depression could instead be located in the fact that the trauma has not been healed in the normal course of life.
Now the net of "causes" is cast far and wide: anything which interferes with your ability to heal is a potential cause. Perhaps economic necessity is barring you from taking downtime. Or overstimulation. Or winter never comes. Or the downtime isn’t working, and if it isn't working, perhaps it is because you don't know how to use the time, or don't have the help you need to move through your feelings. Or, you might actively resist the healing process, because you've been taught to see depressiveness as a bad or shameful thing.
This "Winter's Work" model would be my first hypothesis as to the nature of seasonal depression. And it reveals how a statement like "X causes depression" is nearly nonsensical without a coherent theory in which to situate the claim.
Yet our psychiatric culture seems to consist predominantly of claims and counter-claims of just this form, and therefore manages to be "not even wrong", in that sense that, even if it identifies a "cause" correctly, will as likely as not arrive the wrong course of action.
You might prove beyond any doubt, say, that "a deficiency of Vitamin D causes seasonal depression"—a perfectly plausible-seeming theory. But this recommends that you supplement Vitamin D, while a theory like "Vitamin D is in the causal pathway by which seasonal light levels trigger the onset of a seasonal healing process" says you should only do that if now is a bad time to heal. But you’ll reach the same conclusion if you don’t recognize depression as a drive to heal at all, or if you don’t know how to do what it asks of you. A culture which treats depression is one which is unthinkingly asserting that all times are bad times to heal. Well, this could be true—like a stopped clock—but "Winter's Work" predicts that this person is going to fall ever further behind on their "trauma debt". Their depressions will escalate, and the treatments will escalate to follow; their life will bend however it needs to to make up the difference, and if it can't, a total breakdown is the predictable result.
Look: we've chased the "cause" of depression all the way back to "believing the wrong things about the causes of depression"!
And our culture manages to entertain a few of these "not even wrong" ideas about depression at once. There’s: depression as a “disease”, a view which basically exists to allocate state resources and moral concern, and to deflect judgment. Then there's depression as a kind of "weather pattern" which just sweeps in out of the blue to knock you down—often depicted in TV ads; a kind of twisted attempt at tact, I think. Then there's the "chemical imbalance", a trick employed to deflect the shame of a life not well-lived—but, Christ, your feelings are a "chemical imbalance", you'll be chemically-balanced when you're dead.
Worst of all is the genetic cause—the "happy gene". This too tries to deflect the shame. But this trick of rhetoric instead identifies the state of depressiveness as a fixed and immutable characteristic of a person’s nature. If you can be convinced of this, no hope remains for escaping it, or even trying to. This cause can fortunately be ruled out purely on logical grounds: no empirical study of life outcomes could tell the difference between an inherent depressiveness and an inherent mal-adaptedness to the modern world—because every person you could study lives in the modern world. The world, though, can always be changed; we are never truly without agency.
I arrive at the conclusion that the concept of depression is itself a primary cause of our modern epidemic of depression. Of course the concept isn't really wrong; it describes a real phenomenon. But something like quantum-mechanics seems to apply: you can't, in fact, describe the human condition without also affecting it.
Imagine in your mind’s eye a scene of a depressed person through two lenses. In the first they’re labeled with the word “Depression”, while in the second you view them wordlessly, without any label interceding on your natural emotional response. In the latter I see a person who is confused by the things that have happened to them, or is in a kind of moral or spiritual crisis, or who genuinely wants to be alone rather than to have to continue to play their habitual social role. Pity arises, and I feel a tug to ask them what's wrong and to listen, and to treat them tenderly; certainly not to judge or give advice. Or if I am not close enough to reach out, at least I ought to live well and welcome them to join me—never as a treatment, but only as a natural extension of my joy.
The heavy word “Depression” instead cuts short the instinct to care. It makes the condition incomprehensible, and a repulsion arises, as if the depressed person is to be blamed for inviting madness into their own life. Their state becomes a medical problem, and their actual feelings become irritating impositions on the world, better left alone. I want to avoid them—for their own good or for mine?—or if I am do anything, that I direct them to help from some abstract professional in a bureaucratic labyrinth. It's out of my hands. We go our separate ways. The chance to know each other deeply is passed by. And for what?
If we must "reason why" as to the causes of depression, it turns out to be vital to do it well. The wrong "cause"—or the wrong interpretation of a cause—can divert our human instincts onto the wrong course entirely. But these instincts are, again, the information by which we know what we need. When you're tired, sleep; when you feel depressed, be depressed; when you feel moved to care, care.
"Winter's Work" avoids all this. It assigns no single "right" answer as to the cause of depression. Which causes are pertinent will depend on the circumstances and on what else you need to be doing.
Furthermore: depression itself actually has a lot to do with causality. If you ask a depressed person why they're depressed (and they don't deflect to be polite), their answers turn out to look something like a meditation on the causality of life. What comes out will be blame, aggrievement, and self-pity—unpleasant emotions all, but which arise for a good reason and give a hint as to the heart of the matter. Blame externalizes the cause of a trauma, and tries to build a case against who or what is to blame. Aggrievement tries to rationalize anger, so as to arrive at some solid ground from which to stand up for oneself; it identifies the cause of traumatic experiences in the failure to defend oneself with anger, or in a confusion about what one is is entitled to. And self-pity aims to reframe one’s self-narrative to make different inferences, saying: "this life I've lived—it is not reflective of me. If things had been different I would be different. I didn't have a chance. Pity me."
These feelings, though unsavory, are central to the process by which we rebuild at an inner sense of safety, and by which we figure out what to do about the things that have hurt us or the ideals we have failed to live up to. In the end there will be healing—grief and acceptance—but first we have to learn. If you try to skip these steps and go on as if the traumas didn’t happen, you won't grow up. You can’t—this is what growing up is!
All this means that the concept of depression must be recognized as one of the causes at work in the lives of the depressed. It is within the scope of their meditations—and it deserves, I think, quite a lot of the blame.
I don't think I'm overstating the case here. Our concept of depression leaves no room for agency. If you want to do anything about your own state you have to crawl out from under it first. It instead seems designed to take the shortest path back to "okay", but at the cost of giving up on everything depression actually asks of us—on figuring out how to be safe, and how to live well.
The most hopeless cases of depression I have known were those of people who believed completely in the chemical-imbalance or genetic causes. These suggest no course of action except medication—but of course no medication ever works for long. These causes make no allowance for the role of one's actual beliefs and feelings, even viewing these as irrelevant or delusional, when, in my experience, these are the whole of the matter and are exactly what has to be taken seriously.
This essay is, of course, the product of my own depressive meditations on the causes in my life. I arrived at "Winter's Work" by trying to understand how it came to be that I was never able to find and take the time to restore and orient myself, and that the surrounding culture seemed to oppose and pathologize this need at every turn. Nobody around me was doing or saying what to me seemed obvious—taking downtime, figuring things out for themselves, and recommending others do the same. This, then, is the advice I wish I had gotten when I was much younger—as many essays are.
IV. Diseased Thinking
Assume still that "Winter's Work" is broadly correct—that seasonal depression is a need to rest and heal, and that some amount of other depressions are better seen as drowning in healing-debt.
Can we then explain how our culture has arrived at a conception of depression which looks nothing like this and which as I've just argued is actively counterproductive?
I should say here that I am interested primarily in the culturally-transmitted idea of depression, not in the academic one. The two are related, but to the extent they differ it is the cultural idea which has power over people, while it is some mix of the two which has the power to steer institutions and policy.
"Depression" will typically enter a person's life from one of three directions. First by firsthand experience of their own depression, which from the inside feels more like a moral failing—like "I should want to...", "why can't I..." or "what's wrong with me...". Second by secondhand experience of a family member or friend becoming unreachable and perhaps also letting us down. And third by suicide: most often in distant people and understood in aggregate, but sometimes in people close to us, and sometimes without even knowing they're depressed.
The unitary concept of "depression" has to span all of these. But in doing so it must necessarily round off the different implications of these very different experiences. What we see here is the fallacy Scott Alexander calls diseased thinking—the mistake of treating a thing as if it is equivalent to the category label which has been applied to it. “Disease” is the paradigmatic example, and “depression is a disease” is affected by this exact problem.
When we extend the concept-label "depression" so far that it encompasses suicide, the most taboo of topics, it is virtually required that the label itself bear acquires a haunted existential aura; suicide must be incomprehensible to the living. As such we can never endorse depression: depression has to be bad, it has to be a thing we cannot look at. But by making the most extreme case the paradigm we prevent ourselves from seeing all the other cases as they are.
The situation is something like that of an explorer whose map is marked "here be dragons" far off in the East, who therefore has resolved never to go East at all, associating all Eastward-ness with the furthermost perils imaginable. They would never get anywhere!
The most useful sense of depression for most people will be one defined in the immediate neighborhood of "normal feelings", rather than one arrived at by working inward from the most extreme cases. Depression, I think, is a far closer neighbor to confusion than to suicide, or even to sadness. It has much more to do with learning than with anything bleak or existential.
Death in most cases is quite off-topic; it is the association with suicide that brings death onto the table. Certainly the seriousness of depression in a population should not be measured in deaths.10 Nor should it be measured in dollars. Depression is not at root a public-health problem nor an economic one, and when viewed through those lenses will always be misunderstood.11
For most people the healing of trauma is an end in itself. We want to learn to be safe in the world—that's why we keep getting depressed! But to validate and permit what depression asks of us requires we think thoughts which have become impossible to think.
My aim in identifying depression as "Winter's Work" is to find a way out from under all the words and ideas we've piled on top of the reality of the thing. For my own depressions, not a single one of these ideas has ever been useful. The one thing that has worked is essentially an extrapolation from the Zen saying above, though I came by it by other means.
To put it simply: when you're depressed—be depressed. When you're confused—be confused. Ruminate, mull, brood, read, write, go to therapy, complain, argue on the internet. Do whatever it takes to get answers. These desires are your desires, as alien as they may seem, and arise for a good reason. Self-respect requires respecting these parts of yourself too. You cannot go back to being the person you used to be, because more has happened to you, and this new information must now be made sense of and learned from. There is no way out but through.
V. To Every Thing There Is a Season
Is "Winter's Work" true? I can't prove it; that must be left to professionals. But I think something like it must be true, based on the intuitions acquired from years of study of math, physics, and software, and as an observer of human nature. It resonates well with the reality of my own life—that I would experience a depressive decline around the first dark months of each "era" of my life: middle school, high school, grad school, and my first real job. I suppose I had been trying to bear through each era of my life to reach the point when I expected to be able to rest. But there was always another era around the corner, and no end to the work. Rest never came, until finally I built up the funds to buy myself enough time to start sorting through the pieces of my life.12 Before long I was no longer depressed but instead was overflowing with ideas: to read and write and above all to process some twenty years of undigested life experience, which has led me here.
It is perhaps more important that such a theory be useful than it be true (although it's very useful to be true). So—is "Winter's Work" useful? I think it is. It says a lot, and it says it very clearly compared to the vague picture of "mental illness" we typically encounter. Above all it inverts depressiveness into a desire and a need, for time and for healing, which lets us then imagine asserting that desire and pushing back against other needs.
Just to recognize that time is what you need can be helpful, so as to become conscious of what you're trading it away for, and how cheaply. Many of our otherwise-unexplainable appetites for shallow and frivolous things—novelty, vanity, pleasure, addiction—I think are best seen as reflective of the presence of invisible wounds to the mind, for which these things are only short-term salves we reach for when real downtime is unimaginable. They bring no healing. What we really need is time—which, after all, heals all wounds.
It should not take a fortune to come by time. We are, in a sense, entitled to our time; in the distant past we would have had the winter as reward for a years' work done. Now we get nothing, at least without a great personal effort and the wherewithal to deviate considerably from our cultural norms. This entitlement is not a moral reality, but making it so is a mere political problem. To do so would be wise: it is what our natures expect, and to fail to arrange our society to account for it has tremendous costs.
If we set our minds to it, we could do a great deal as a society to give people the time they want and need.
We can start young by letting kids sleep. We can teach children to recognize and resolve their own confusions—and to realize that this as a responsibility owed to themselves; that a great deal of growing up does not simply happen but is something you do, which nobody can do for you. This I think would be far more palatable to the young than "therapy culture", which is either too mushy and undemanding or is tainted by the troubled mystery of mental illness, which the young tend to want nothing to do with unless it has affected them personally.
To the extent that the winter part of "Winter's Work" bears out, the schedule of schooling ought to accommodate this rhythm. My experience suggests that normal school ought to cease around Thanksgiving and restart around February. Rather than a complete cessation or reduction of hours, what I suspect would be best would be to change the character of school in the winter, de-emphasizing sustained focus and heavy mental lifting in favor of culture, history, and the arts (which can be absorbed passively), as well as physical skills (to rest the abstract mind). The hope would be that the spring and falls months could be made more cognitively intense, to compensate. The exact approach would derive from evidence, but the real point here is that a clear model of the mind in winter recommends far larger and more distinct policies than do any vague notions of "mental health".
Adults are called to work, but it should not be so difficult to take time for oneself when you need it. The central culprit is the rigidity of the forty-hour work week. Corporate culture has trended somewhat towards permissiveness in this respect, but only in a patchwork way which seems to rest on rather flimsy principles. The real matter is that, as long as it requires working a forty-hour week to afford a house, taking full seasons off is unthinkable. Instead you hold out hope for retirement—which comes much too late.
Since so much of income goes to housing, an easy win here would simply be to build a lot of it. But the marginal value of a house is only loosely related to the cost of building it; instead it is set by the income of the marginal home-buyer, who is also working a forty-hour week; in this way the dominant social norms force themselves on everyone else. Norms can change, but this particular norm in America is staked in place by the linking of health insurance with full-time employment. It is this, more than anything, which bars us from taking time when we need it. And this is a policy choice—though it feels otherwise—which means it, too, can be changed.
When I try to imagine taking aim at the forty-hour work-week, my own mind autocompletes the reaction "nobody wants to work anymore". A world that doesn't coerce people to work, and to work a lot, is nearly unthinkable. The paternalistic part of the mind doesn't trust self-pity not to indulge itself forever, and therefore refuses to let it in at all.
But "Winter's Work" avoids this too. The trick is to delineate life into a time for work and a time for rest—always both. Each justifies the other. The promise of the other season’s return puts to rest the fear of the present season extending indefinitely. In this way both seasons are made tolerable.
"Winter's Work" recommends much more than this on the policy and culture fronts, but for now I think I’ve said enough. Let us now backtrack, and, against the advice of the poets, attempt one last time to “reason why”.
VI. Everything Everywhere All At Once
What is the cause of depression?
In the seasonal case, the cause could be said to be winter itself.
Or we can be specific: the lack of sunlight, the lack of Vitamin D, the cold, the climate, your latitude.
And also: social isolation, physical inactivity.
But also: that you haven't been going outside. That you haven't had people over. That you haven't cleaned your home. That you haven't wanted to. That you haven't been able to want to. That you haven't chosen to.
Then, if the present theory is to believed, we can add to this list: the Trauma, and also the trauma.
And the causes thereof: the fact that you weren't safe. That you weren't protected. That you couldn't protect yourself. That you didn't know you had to. That you didn't think you were supposed to. That you couldn't figure it out in the moment, because of whatever fear does to the mind. That you still don't feel safe. That you haven't processed everything. That you keep making the same mistakes. That you haven't learned from your mistakes. That you haven't had the time to process everything. That you didn't know you needed to. That you weren't taught to, or how. That you thought it would happen on its own. That you haven't taken the time. That you haven’t chosen to.
That you can't open up about your feelings. That your culture doesn't tell you to. That it doesn't let you—not you, not those feelings. That you don't have anyone you really trust to talk to. That you have trust issues, and the people who caused those trust issues. Then there are the people who don't care. And the people who do, but who lack the skill to hold space, who are too reactive, too ideological, too cliché—probably because they haven't been able to process their feelings—for all these same reasons. And also: that you lack for deep relationships. That you haven't invested in your relationships. That you haven't taken care of people when they needed it and therefore can't ask the same of them. That you haven't been able to. That you haven't wanted to. That you haven't chosen to…
…And why not? Because you weren't taught well. Because you were shamed instead of validated. Because of your parents. Because it takes a village and you didn't have a village. Because you entered adulthood on an empty tank of self-esteem and have spent your life so far only trying to refill to baseline. Because you had no one to talk to. Because of the abuse, the neglect. Because life's not fair. Because of their parents. Because of their trauma. Because of the ways things were back then, and still are. Because they didn't choose. Because they doesn't realize they had to. Because they didn't have much time to think about it. Because so little of this comes naturally, despite it feeling like it should. Because this shouldn't be so hard. Because it is and we have no choice but to figure it out anyway.
Because of the phones, because of the social media, because the internet, the games, the porn, the politics parties alcohol drugs sex attention. Because of addiction: short-term salves for short-term safety. Because a part of you did want those things. Because a part of your culture endorses these things, or permits them, or forbids them but for the wrong reasons, or misunderstands them. Because you didn't know better. Because you didn't care. Because it didn't matter. Because you assumed you would outgrow it in time. Because you didn't think you had a choice. Because of your choices.
And what's more—because of work. Because you're tired after work. Because you aren't rich. Because you weren't born rich. Because you weren't lucky. Because you were lucky but you squandered it. Because you wanted to earn it. Because of the economy, the economic factors, the economic paradigm, the headwinds, the trade war, the trade winds, because of other people who voted for this, or whose interests are served by it, or who don't know any better. Because of money. Because of the way we worship money. Because you don't just want to work for money. Because you shouldn't have to. Because you are entitled to something more. Because you thought you were entitled to something more. Because of injustice. Because of capitalism. Because of other people's choices. Because of your choices.
Because of your body. Your mind. Your skin, bones, shoulders, joints, posture, hair, lack of hair, loss of hair, penis, breasts, butt, nose, ears, skin color, weight, hormones, brain chemistry. Because of your genes. Because of what people said about your body. Because people weren’t interested in you. Because you weren’t hot. Or because you were too hot. Because of how you dressed. Because you didn’t exercise. Because you shouldn’t need to. Because you chose not to.
Because you didn't go to therapy. Because you did but it didn't help. Because so many therapists are bad at it. Because you shouldn't have to. Because it's offensive when people tell you to. Because you live in a culture where caretaking work is habitually outsourced, such that nobody feels called to it or knows how to do it. Because we file away depression as a disease or a chemical imbalance or genetic. Because of the medication. Because you went off the medication. Because of the side effects. Because nobody knows how to solve these problems the right way. Because nobody wants to. Because they don't realize they have to. Because they've given up. Because they chose to be happy. Or to have hope.
Because—in short—of your whole history. And your parents and their histories, and world history.
And because of Fate itself, the initial conditions of life, from which everything else has followed.
But at this point the exercise is nearly a joke. The causes of everything fan out enormously into the past. Who is responsible? Who is to blame? Some causes point more starkly to duties than others, but once you see before you the power to prevent a wound—shouldn't you? The onus to do something could be said to fall on any of the innumerable causes. Many can be chased back to one's own choices—it is by this meditation on causality that we disentangle our agency from the world and therefore come to see clearly our own capacity to choose. But surely something is owed to us, too; surely some of the onus can be placed outside of ourselves; surely we owe something to one other. To take the responsibility entirely on oneself would be crushing, would be torture. In the litany above I have cast the onus all over the place: on you, on me, on our parents, on other people, on the internet, on society, capitalism, scarcity, the system, and in the end on Fate itself, the cause of causes, which cannot be held responsible and whose acts can only be weathered, or grieved.
Some of these causes come from my own depressive meditations. Some I have heard from others, or invented. Some I react to with a scoff, catching them in a net of irony. But some catch on something else in me, and—like a trickle of clear water from stone—pity arises. To see laid out the web of all these causes brings forth a shiver of recognition of the bare fact of life: how things happen to us. How trauma works: generational and karmic, arbitrary and fractal. How even the people and forces I would blame for the course of own life were in turn affected by other people and forces; how their lives happened to them just as mine has happened to me. How, if for a season I loosen my grip on myself, invert myself into a juncture of causes and effects, dismantle myself, so as to be washed clean in the waters of pity, dried off in the light of understanding—how it is only fair I extend to others the same grace.
Grace? Here? More water. A murmur in a spring which has always been dry. Another recognition: that this self-indulgent inward turn we call “depression” is the means by which one comes by the capacity for grace. That wisdom too is learned—that we are not born knowing how to see others justly; this must be learned from stories, above all from our own stories. How our nature is not to never be hurt, but to be hurt and to become whole again. How we are not innately safe, but must learn how, from others and from our own experiences. How we are then called, called by something within us, to go and tell all we have learned: to spread the word, to cross-pollinate and recombine, ad infinitum; this is life.
Gazing over the web of causes it would seem we have collectively created Hell: so many pains and hardships, each bringing one another about in turn, with each un-whole person unable to attend to the needs of the other un-whole people, and every failure to heal amounting to another harm. Depression, confusion, detachment, irony, judgment, shame: all are contagious. Every trauma is a wound in the world, like a point source of pain crying out constantly to be healed. There would seem to be no hope of righting all of these wrongs.
And yet at the same time we find that absolutely nothing is monocausal, least of all depression itself. And it follows that the healing need not be monocausal either—we need not seek out remedies and justice for each affliction one-for-one. Instead a duty arises: to endeavor to be a source of healing, of love, safety, and understanding, in any way we can. To take on the work of untangling our own confusions, not only for ourselves but as a duty to others, in order that we may in time have something to give. To figure out what it takes to live well in our time (which has never happened before, and for which there are to be found no right answers, but only best answers, which will be the products of our own best efforts). And to spread the word of what works, so as to spare others the pain of having to figure it all out for themselves as we had to.
The power to heal bubbles forth involuntarily in all of us. Each can be a point source of healing—an antiparticle of trauma and fear—if we allow ourselves to be; if, when we need to heal, we heal.
The duty of the living, in short, is to be a source of life. If anything is holy it must be this. This is our work, an essential part of which is Winter's Work—depression. We misapprehend it out of fear: that we will not get to live, or worse, that it will take life away. But depression is rightly a part of a full life, and the lives we live if we reject the dark season of our nature can never be whole ones. It is would be better, then, to do what it asks of us—however strange it may seem.
❄️ ❄️ ❄️
Perhaps therapists should work at night. Perhaps we should remotely work with therapists located a few timezones over so they can be wide awake and self-contained while we loosen and grow porous.
A disclaimer: the case I'm making surely can not apply to all depressions. I mean only for it to extend to any particular depression to the extent it is like my own, which I know well—recurring for years, never extreme or suicidal, but often debilitating, and which, while from the outside would certainly be called “depression”, from the inside always felt like a moral confusion about who I was supposed to be and why life and learning weren’t coming naturally. I suspect that most depressions are like mine, at least some of the time.
I will pretend, for the sake of argument, that seasonal depression always occurs in the winter. Feel free to add whatever epicycles are needed to account for the fact that it does not.
Another analogy: depression looks something like the "backward pass" of training an AI, as opposed to the "forward pass" of predicting and doing. These are two distinct modes of thinking even though they make use of the same mind. The thoughts arising in the two modes are almost incommensurable—a forward-mode mind cannot really mirror one in backward-mode; backward-mode thinking is not goal-oriented but instead looks more like "searching a maze" or "solving a jigsaw puzzle". To a mind in forward-mode this feels dishonest and a little profane. There can be no meeting of such minds. I find this analogy quite clarifying; it is actually one of the first seeds from which this entire essay grew. See my essay on learning for more along these lines.
Anecdotally, I experienced this transition starkly when I lived in a drafty apartment in Wisconsin: as soon as it got cold I would suddenly have an enormous appetite for cheeseburgers, and after a week or so would acquire the ability to tolerate freezing temperatures in little more than a t-shirt. I assume that more extreme cases are possible.
I read somewhere a claim that pre-industrial peasants in some places and times would pack their bodies together to hibernate through the winter months, but on review this particular fact seems doubtful.
This line of thinking leads me to the much sketchier theory that air conditioning, the quintessential modern luxury, might actually have all sorts of adverse effects on our regulatory cycles, and could possibly lead to otherwise hard-to-explain cases of mental illness, obesity, etc.
An interesting anthropic-ish argument applies here. Conditional on the fact that any living thing is observed to exist, not as a one-off but as many instances of some recognizable common form, it follows that whatever goes up must come down within a fairly tight timescale, and v.v. Any truly unstable system would hardly ever be observed.
The only times I've personally thought about suicide were right after psychiatrists asked me a bunch of probing questions about suicide. This seems bad!
Here we have a "legibility" problem: our state-funded institutions are hopeless at taking on emotional and moral problems, but fairly good at understanding health and economic ones, as these measurable, and because so much faith has been placed on the ideals of medicine and economic growth that it is easiest to make progress on any project by hitching it to one of them. This, though, biases us to see every problem through these lenses—which is perhaps a reasonable way for the state to think about its duties, but you and I are not the state and need not abide by its customs.