Northern Attitude

One Man’s Mission to upset Global working standards.

Fall is in full force here in Wisconsin, and winter is just around the corner. I love winter. It’s my favorite season. I thrive in the cold. But, if I’m being honest, the lack of daylight is a huge drawback. While I understand that almost all locations experience seasonal shifts in daylight hours, these are more pronounced in far northern (and southern) latitudes. Many have heard of consequences like seasonal affective disorder, but these changes affect us in a much deeper way than I think most realize. And modern society has made it worse.

Where I live, there is less than 9 hours of daylight on the winter solstice. According to the US Census Bureau, the average American has a 27.2-minute one-way commute for work. If we use nice, round numbers, a 30-minute commute to work, a standard 8-hour workday, and a 30-minute commute from work means that the “average” person dedicates 9 hours a day to work. The result of this, many people only experience daylight through a window during the winter months. And if somebody works more than 8 hours a day, as many do, even the lowlight dawn and twilight hours are gone. This takes a toll.

Many, like me, are heavily impacted by the change in seasons. Mental and physical health decline. Living in darkness affects the mind and generally leads to depressed moods. Reduced Vitamin D due to decreased sunlight is linked to many health concerns. Because we spend all of our daylight hours at work, we are also less active, which has physical effects that are compounded by the lack of Vitamin D. This all leads to a decline in productivity, mood, general life satisfaction, and many other negative outcomes. But we are expected to function as if none of this were happening. There are statistics to back up all of these claims and more, but I have elected not to include them for the sake of the quick op-ed format.

I can hear it now. “People have always dealt with this. This is just another example of modern society being soft and looking for things to complain about”. But to anybody of that opinion, let’s think a little deeper. Electricity and artificial light are relatively new inventions. Go way back to hunter-gatherer and nomadic societies that were largely dependent on daylight. The hours in which people could hunt, gather, or set up camp were greatly diminished in the winter. It’s hard to hunt or gather when you can’t see. It’s hard to set up a warm camp in the frigid temperatures. How did people cope with this? They spent long hours in the summer moving to hunt and gather. They preserved the food for the winter when opportunities to obtain sustenance were limited, and when winter hit, they stayed put.

Stepping forward a little bit in time, agrarian societies had the same seasonality. Yes, a farmer may still have livestock to tend in the winter, but you can’t harvest many crops in the snow. There’s a reason you hear people use the phrase “make hay while the sun shines”. Again, people put in long hours planting, tending to, and harvesting crops in the summer months in preparation for winter. Throughout nearly all human history, winter has been a time of rest forced upon the population.

Artificial light and shifts to a more modern society now give us the ability to be much more productive in the winter, but because the human animal evolves slowly, we’re still wired for that winter rest. Our technology has outpaced the ability of our bodies to adapt, and this disconnect creates the issues noted above. We have the ability to run full force in the summer like we always did, but we are now also expected to run full force in the winter too. When is our season of rest?

So, here’s my proposition. Let’s take a step back and relink our expectations with the natural world. Why is the standard an 8-hour workday all year long? Why, in Wisconsin, can’t we have a 10-hour workday in the dead of summer and shift that to a 6-hour workday in the winter? As I stated, we’re less productive in the winter anyway, so would reducing the work hours really change the bottom line, especially if I’m agreeing to be more productive in the summer? Give me time in the winter to get outside and enjoy the little sunlight that I have access to. Don’t expect me to be as productive. Give me rest. Let me live according to nature and be healthier and happier for it.

In Dallas, Texas, where the seasonality is less extreme, maybe a 9-hour/7-hour shift would be more appropriate. In Edmonton, Canada, where the seasonal swing is more extreme, an 11-hour/5-hour shift would be more appropriate. Again, I can hear the objection. We have offices in Dallas and Edmonton. How are those offices supposed to work together during the winter with such drastically different hours? Wouldn’t it be hard to track the logistics and handle differing workload expectations throughout the year? This just seems messy. We figured out electricity. I think these seem like pretty small problems to solve in comparison. We could figure it out easily if we wanted to.

Battling nature typically doesn’t end well for us or nature. So, let’s stop trying to fight it and live in accordance with it. Let’s take back our season of rest. I know one guy’s thoughts won’t change the global workforce, but we’ve already seen huge recent shifts in the global workforce from remote work to different expectations of younger generations. So, maybe one guy’s thoughts are enough to jump on the trend and start the conversation.