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It’s wilder than that. You feel the temperature drop around you. Animals start to freak out cause they think night has fallen. Even more crazy is shadow snakes. Where you see the shadows around you start to shimmer. Kind of like the shadows of atmospheric disturbances you see during really hot days or near a fire.
My unga bunga ancestors, absolutely surrounded by shadow snakes during an eclipse
Also, the overall tone of the light is wrong and it’s almost impossible to articulate why.
It’s not dark per se, but the light doesn’t just seem dimmed, it seems like it’s in a different spectrum.
It feels like when a movie puts a filter over the film to indicate that something very very bad is happening, like an eldritch horror has arrived offscreen, and the bad light is slowly sucking your soul out of your body, only it’s real life, and the bad light permeates everywhere.
Imagine being a caveman and looking up one day to see the sky has gone dark and what looks to be God’s eye is starting directly at you
I’ve been in a total solar eclipse before and, honestly, the most surprising thing to me was just how much the temperature drops, and how quickly it does, too
Good news: if you’re currently laying around and not producing anything, you are a credit to your species.
I’m an ant biologist and I’d like to point out that ants also spend a significant percentage of the time doing nothing.
Turns out sometimes the most evolutionary useful thing you can do is chill and not wear yourself to shreds, whether mammal or insect. It helps you deal with emergencies and adapt to change. Plus, you can act as living food storage!
That last part is probably more an ant thing than a human thing, but hey, live your dreams.
it’s also a bear thing, which absolutely explains me
Doing absolutely fuck-all is how antarctic sea sponges live to be over 10,000 years old, so live your best, longest, laziest life.
Remember lions? Fellow apex predators?
Yeah, they spend 16-20 hours of the day laying around, socializing, raising Cubs and napping.
The last 4-8 hours are spent hunting.
Wait wait, they’re not a primate so they don’t count.
How about Orangutans?
Well, they spend 90% of their time awake just hanging out in food-rich areas, eating fruit and leaves, socializing, raising children, and chilling.
Well, they’re not people so it doesn’t-
How about Stone Age people in Europe?
They probably worked 3-5 hours per day, every day. (Though seasonal changes in food scarcity could change that)
Laborers in ancient Egypt worked 8 hours, with an hour break at lunch. They did this for 8 days, then rested 2 days. That sounds familiar. Except… they also had regular time off for festivals and holidays, and only worked for about 18 out of every 50 days.
Artisans in imperial Rome generally worked from 6am to Noon, and then had the rest of the day off… and only worked for half the year, due to all the holidays and festivals they got off.
But that’s too easy, what about a Peasant in medieval England?
6-8 hours per day, with Sundays off, Farm workers put in longer hours at harvest time but worked shorter days in winter when there are fewer hours of daylight. Economist Juliet Schor estimates that in the period following the Plague they worked no more than 150 days a year, due to the long holidays and many festivals.
Ugh, let’s go poorer. 17th century France. Starvation was afoot for the working poor!
During the reign of King Louis XIV, the workers of France had it tough, and hunger for the poorest was a fact of life. The typical working day was as much as 12 hours long, but two hours were set aside midday for lunch and perhaps an afternoon nap. Nevertheless, the Ancient Régime is said to have also guaranteed peasants, labourers and other workers a total of 52 Sundays, 90 rest days and 38 religious holidays off per year, meaning they worked just 185 out of 365 days.
So what changed?
The industrial revolution, baybe~~
New factory owners could work their employees to the bone due to a lack of regulation and abundance of cheap labour.
The typical factory worker in mid 19th-century England toiled away for a soul-destroying 16 hours a day, six days a week, 311 days per year!
THAT nightmare became the standard by which western society began to judge “work-life balance” and anything gentler than the industrial factory’s unfettered brutality is considered “softness”
(So many people died being mangled in those machines. Hair handkerchiefs went into style during American industrialization because working women would otherwise get their hair caught in the machines, and be either scalped or be bodily pulled inside to die…. But that’s a horror for another time)
Americans in 2020 worked an average of 8.5 hours per day on weekdays, plus another 5 hours on weekends.
Taking out federal holidays and weekends, we work 262 days per year. Most of us get 5-9 sick days to take per year. (Yes, a fixed number, no matter how sick you really are), and usually either no paid vacation, or 7-15 days paid vacation, depending on seniority and the company. Unpaid vacation doesn’t have a max, but taking it often risks you getting fired.
Even comparing against the poorest laborers in ancient history the current working structure for humans is, frankly, inhumane.
We are mammals. Let us rest. Let us celebrate holidays and attend festivals. Let us attend to our homes and families.
Even the ultra wealthy folks who got their heads chopped off gave us more time off than this!!!
Someone in the comments said something like “humans are instinctively industrious and productive, as social creatures!”
Buddy, that’s a lie fed to you by capitalism.
In our default state, we attend to our families yes, but we also party like hell, lounge around, and make fantastic works of art just to be proud of ourselves. We made beautiful things for the joy of creating them.
Stone Age humans may have spent a couple hours hunting and gathering, but DEFINITELY spent loads of time painting every available surface. Time and weather washed most of it away, but some places like Arizona and Colorado still preserve a few of the endless murals made by ancient hands.
Evidence shows that the ancient world was COVERED in paintings and etchings - just saturated with images of birds and beasts and humans, sunsets and cool weather. We invented mythologies and painted about them. We did something impressive, and painted about it. We taught our children how to paint and lifted them into our shoulders so they could mark the ceiling.
In our most base state, humans will work enough to survive, but our instincts demand we use all other time to create art. We want to communicate. To make connections.
“Working” or “being productive” is not on that list.
Thus is the defining characteristic of gay millennials: we straddle the pre-Glee and post-Glee worlds. We went to high school when faggot wasn’t even considered an F-word, when being a lesbian meant boys just didn’t want you, when being nonbinary wasn’t even a remote option. We grew up without queer characters in our cartoons or Nickelodeon or Disney or TGIF sitcoms. We were raised in homophobia, came of age as the world changed around us, and are raising children in an age where it’s never been easier to be same-sex parents. We’re both lucky and jealous. As the state of gay evolved culturally and politically, we were old enough to see it and process it and not take it for granted–old enough to know what the world was like without it. Despite the success of Drag Race, the existence of lesbian Christmas rom-coms, and openly transgender Oscar nominees, we haven’t moved on from the trauma of growing up in a culture that hates us. We don’t move on from trauma, really. We can’t really leave it in the past. It becomes a part of us, and we move forward with it.
For LGBTQ+ milennials, our pride is couched in painful memories of a culture repulsed and frightened by queerness. That makes us skittish. It makes us loud. It makes us fear that all this progress, all this tolerance […] can vanish as quickly as it all appeared.
The 2000s Made Me Gay, Grace Perry
Coming from a reference group where everyone’s first queer movie was either Rocky Horror or Brokeback Mountain, it’s fascinating to talk (in person!) to gay teenagers who grew up with Korra and Stephen Universe and She-Ra.
my main thing is when i see posts like “i’m not sure if i’m a lesbian or trans or nonbinary or whatever and i’m already 16, what the hell” because dear LORD wee one it is FINE, when i was 16, and i am Not That Old and raised in a pretty accepting environment, i was really only super aware of one of those concepts as an actual option, with transness being a vague sort of thing on the horizon of my knowledge but not really in the context of transmasculinity, and the idea that you could just be neither being right out. and i considered gayness to be not really an option because at that point in my life the only real connection i had felt with that community was that half the kids in my school called me a dyke. one of my friends was trans, and their main expression of that was school-mandated spirit week crossdressing days because they couldn’t have dreamed of getting away with it any other time. to see kids feel like they’re late bloomers because they haven’t settled on agender or genderfluid before they’re out of high school- it’s positive, but a massive culture shock
