054: Do We Ask For Too Much During Summer?

What if we're doing this all wrong?

Hi friends,

How’s everyone holding up in this heat? I, for one, have practically become nocturnal to avoid the worst of it. I sleep most days from about 3 pm to 7 pm, eat some combination of breakfast and dinner food that we don’t have a nickname for yet, then start up my work again. I realize this is not a possible solution for most people, but if you have the luxury of setting your own hours I really recommend this strategy.

I wish I had more exciting things to tell you all about right now than my sleep schedule. I’m making slow but steady progress on my book; I still sort of can’t believe I’m writing one. Maybe someday, when I’m holding a physical copy in my hands, it will finally feel real.

But until then, there are these little essays to write and read. Let’s hop into it.

Source.

I've been reliably informed that not everyone loves summer. Admittedly, the season is hot and sticky, and part of the appeal as kids was probably that we had the whole season to play instead of going to school. Perhaps my ongoing love for summer is just about that nostalgia, that urge to run outside and play.

Lately, a statistic keeps running through my head: "For each degree above 27° Celsius (80.6° Fahrenheit), productivity decreased by 4%."

Sure, that comes from a capitalist hellscape of an article, one which dictates to bosses how to save money during this summertime "laziness" in their factories, but the core truth at the center of that plutocratic nightmare remains the same: Productivity naturally dips in the summer.

Human bodies aren't made to operate in high heat.

(Actually, a lot of animal bodies aren't made to operate in the heat either. Many go into states of dormancy, like hibernation, during the hottest parts of the day or year. That said, heat stress is killing off more and more animals each year as climate change gets worse. )

There are ways of coping. Humans sweat, and the human body uses vasodilation to push blood closer to the surface of the skin so it can release heat. (That's why you might get red in the face when you're overheated.) But vasodilation isn't easy; it requires a higher resting heart rate and a lot more calories burned. All that extra labor makes us tired. Add to that the uncomfortable truth that most of us are chronically dehydrated and fatigued and, well, the body giving up every day around 2 pm, when the day is hottest (and blood sugar is probably taking a dip after lunch anyway), suddenly doesn't seem like such a mystery anymore. Sleep, which slows your breath and your heart rate down, is a relief.

I think a lot about how, when your core body temperature reaches about 104°F (around 40°C), your body begins to cook itself. No one likes to think of it like that--"it causes damage to the brain, organs, and muscle" is what people would prefer to say. The reality is: Your body is literally cooking. I'd make a dark joke about a low temperature for a long time makes for tender meat for our fatcat overlords, but even I'm not sure I can get on board with cannibalism for laughs, especially when it doesn't feel far enough from the truth.

I keep wondering: If it were more widely known that higher temperatures makes people less productive, would corporations get on board with combatting climate change? I'm a pragmatic problem-solver, is the thing--I'm fine with a bootleggers and baptists argument if it means we all get to a tolerable end goal. If we prove to corporations that a warming climate impacts their bottom line, that it will make labor more expensive because they'll need more exhausted people to do the same amount of work, will that affect change? Will they finally invest in strategies to lessen climate change--a higher investment now for a lower cost later? Or will they just invest in automation more?

(Bootleggers and baptists is a legislative economics theory saying that two wildly different groups of people, like bootleggers and baptists, will support the same legislation if it accomplishes a goal they can both agree on, even if it's for incredibly different reasons, like Prohibition.)

I muse over the myth that children have school off in the summer because of old agricultural schedules. Think about it--with planting in the spring and harvest in the fall, summer was probably the time when kids were needed least on the farm. No, summers off originated in cities, when combinations of asphalt, metal, and glass made cities sweltering, before A/C showed up to make classrooms tolerable again.

I think a lot about Spain's daily siestas, about France's shutdowns in August. When the heat turns up, they take off. They know there's no point sometimes. Why force it? Why make yourself endure the heat? Just take a break.

I've been watching England's heat wave and thinking about that capitalist productivity math. The high in London earlier this week was 40°C, 13° above the threshold where productivity starts to dip. At 4% per degree, that's a 52% loss in productivity. I wonder if any bosses accounted for that change when they set expectations for their teams. I doubt it.

I keep thinking about running through the sprinklers as a child, of entire days spent reading and swimming at the community pool. I'd show up at 7 am for swim practice then ride my Razor scooter home around 5 pm when my parents would get home from work. In between, I alternated reading books with swimming with whichever of my friends showed up at the pool that day. I had Sour Punch Straws for lunch almost every day; the books of my youth are littered with sticky fingerprints that still smell like artificial strawberries.

Eventually, my summer pool days gave way to College for Kids programs, then to a job as a lifeguard and swim teacher. I haven't had a summer "off" since I was 11 or so.

This summer, as I struggle to balance the work that seemed easier in the spring—my book, my podcast, this newsletter, the non-profit—I think a lot about how our bodies and brains aren't meant for this. Whether you believe in evolution or intelligent design, the fact remains that our bodies aren't built to remain at 100% productivity during the summer. Maybe it's a bad system, but it's the one we're stuck with.

This whole essay wasn't just a long walk for the short drink of water that is the sentence, "I'm taking August off this newsletter." Though it is true that I'm mostly taking August off, shutting down everything I do that isn't writing my book. Call it taking into account my limited capacity for productivity during the summer heat. With a daily temperature over 90° F most days, my productivity is down around 40%. I have to conserve whatever productive energy I have left for finishing this book. I'll be back in late September, once my manuscript is turned in and the temperatures have cooled off.

Unruly Figures podcast @unrulyfigures

Your book is a 10, but you actually have to write it.

As I said, this wasn't a long walk for nothing. I often wonder if the same people who don't like summer are also the people who measure their self-worth by their productivity. I wouldn't know where to begin measuring such a correlation, but I do wonder about it. Admittedly, I'm guilty of this--I really go into full guilt-trip mode when I don't accomplish "enough" every day, which has made this summer a special kind of heat-induced guilty misery.

I think a lot about how it might make summer more tolerable if we learned to demand less of ourselves in these sweaty months; If we leaned instead into the natural state of slackening and rest that our bodies need; If on days with heat indices over 80°F, we did the math of 4*(degrees over 80) and got comfortable with doing at least that much less work.

What if we cut our days to only work in the mornings during the hottest months? What if we adopted France's strategy of just shutting down and getting the hell out of Dodge? What if we used our growing understanding of science to make our lives more comfortable? What if we just took summers off again?

This is my last essay for at least six weeks! I don’t know exactly when I’ll be back yet, but it’ll be sometime during mid-to-late September.

Until then, you can check out episodes of my podcast, Unruly Figures! It’s about history’s greatest rule-breakers, and it’s available wherever you get your podcasts. It’ll be on hiatus for August too, but there are 17 episodes you can catch up on until I’m back in late September with season 2.

Recently I was also a guest on my friend Jay’s podcast, Blockbusting. We talked about the terrible movie The Other Boleyn Girl. You can listen to my episode here.

I hope you get some time to relax this summer! I’ll be back with one more interview next week, but then I’m out of here.

I keep these newsletters free by not worrying too much about typos and flow. But if you want to you can tip me, as a treat. 

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