"Midwinter" by Iris Meredith
These kinds of post will give you a starting point for sharing thought-provoking and critical content in various environments (like in a #random Slack channel at your workplace).
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https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/midwinter
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Intro Line
Midwinter - Iris Meredith
This is a long but beautiful read. If you made it through, please leave a ❄️ below this post!
Quotes
Winter, historically, was also a time for maintenance work, when the damage and wear that the hard work of ploughing, planting and then the harvest inflicted on your home, your clothing and your equipment would be fixed. In general agricultural work (and all work) tends to happen in cycles: you have a period where work gradually ramps up, a period of extremely hard work for some period of time, a cleanup phase and then a period of low ebb wherein we rest, recover and put things back together. [...] Our modern economy does not allow us that grace.
I suspect that for most of us, we deal with the problem by continuing in our patterns of quiet desperation until something happens that makes continuing just flat untenable. Whether it's an illness serious enough to just flat stop you from working no matter how much you might want to push through, some life event that breaks everything or a mental breakdown caused by the sheer weight of the stress you're working under, eventually we hit a point where we just can't keep pushing through and are forced to acknowledge, essentially, that it is winter, that trying to force more work to happen will do no good and that you just can't keep pushing any more.
At this point, what the industry needs more than anything is a rest and for the pressure to produce to turn down. We are, for the moment, out of any real innovative ideas, and we've been running down the technological and social infrastructure that we need to support that kind of work. We need, as with any kind of winter, to slow down, do less new work, reinforce social connections and maintain and repair some of the social and technological damage that we've done by building so many new things. [...] Unfortunately, the valuation of major tech companies, and the ideology that accompanies that, does not allow anyone to settle down and stop trying to innovate.
All of the winters I've discussed are harsh, and are liable to be made harsher by the persistence of people in telling us to push through them and pretending that the winter isn't actually happening at all. Surviving them is genuinely hard. All things, though, are cyclical, and winter, in whatever form, is followed by a new spring. Our job right now is not to grow or to bloom, but to survive, repair, pull together as our community and preserve what we can until we see the new shoots poking through the cracked and broken ground.