Sorry about the popped p’s today! Something’s gone weird with my mic placement.

It’s humid. The kind of humid where you feel like you’ve got a thin sheen on your skin all the time. My wife, a Southerner, is a fan of AC; I’ve never liked artificial cold, it feels weird and I don’t like breathing it. I’d rather be slightly hot and sticky most of the time.

But it’s also kind of fatiguing; I have a long-term mental dialogue about whether or not other people have it worse and I should just suck it up (and I’m in, like, the 5% most privileged people on the planet, so other people invariably constantly have it worse). That helps.

I think there’s a general fundamental worldview split between “I measure things by what I can put up with, and take action when something is intolerable”, and “I prioritize my own comfort and well-being and am proactive in taking care of that.” I definitely fall into the Protestant former category. It’s got pros and cons. But self-care ends up low on the list when you’ve got that mentality.

(I have another essay-length thing about people with “tradeoff” as their default worldview, which I am as well, but that’s another day).

So the trade-off here is that “put up with what you can” is a less expensive lifestyle and means you walk more gently in the world — but can also lead to severe problems that are resource intensive to solve. “Maximize self-care” is more resource-intensive up front, but possibly forestalls a lot of problems that take a lot more to solve.

Is one better than the other? Who knows? But I’m putting up with it.