The Ethics of the Long Winter

I. Promised Rest, Permanent Motion

The holiday season comes and goes, though the promises of time-off, or the chance to take a break never really shows up. The calendar is full of things to do, carols play on repeat, and people talk about "winding down" and "taking a break," like holy chants shared between offices and group chats. Lights in the warehouses stay on, the system keeps moving, and inboxes are full. We go through December with the feeling that the year is about to come to an end, but the promise of the long winter, has faded into the words we use to talk about it, a story we tell over days that are starting to look like any other.

Not too long ago, the world seemed to stop in late December. Factories closed their doors for weeks, and offices emptied. Public transport ran on skeleton schedules, stores closed for days at a time, and the days between one year and the next felt strange. People just were not available. But that is just a memory. "Family time" has become something that needs to be planned ahead and protected from notifications and the urge to "just stay across things". In other words, the long winter has been emptied out from the inside, leaving its outer shell of symbols intact while the inside is used for more work.

So, let us take a moment to think about a season that talks about rest but makes it harder and harder to find. A time when people are less interested in blaming others for not being able to "switch off" and more interested in figuring out what the world looks like that makes it seem like a moral wrong, a professional risk, or an impossible luxury.

II. The Holiday that Never Arrives

Camus begins: a human being who longs for rest, clarity, an answer, and a world that does not answer back. In the gap between rest and life is The Absurd^[1]. The ache between a mind that wants the horizon to end and a landscape that refuses to join together. Camus doesn’t suggest that we close the gap, only that we see it without decoration. A life, he says, is spent between the desire for meaning and the silence of the universe; the question is what we do once we realise the universe will not speak^[2]. It is a strangely quiet position, neither hope nor despair, a kind of honesty about how much of the story we have been telling ourselves all along.

Let us look at December in that light. December is a month that holds the promise of ending, yet it behaves just like any other month. At some point towards the end of the year, we think things will slowly move towards a pause. A last meeting, one final email, and the office will be empty for days. It is not to be. We expect there to be a lever in the machine that will be thrown, and the gears will stop.

Yet, the Long Winter continues.

The stores do not close; they go straight from the carols to the Boxing Day sale. The warehouses never sleep; they just change their signs from "order now for Christmas" to "start the year off right". The screens do not go dark; instead of video calls, there are live chats, status updates, year-end summaries, and streaming marathons. The phrase "going offline for the holidays" has lost its meaning. An out-of-office reply sends our urgent message to someone else who is still available. For many people, the holiday is not a break from work but a change in shifts, hours, and uniforms.

Camus writes about how we hold on to stories even after we know they are not true. This is because we prefer to believe the world will change for us. We live as if our hard work will pay off and the holiday will come. But the break is pushed back, shortened, moved, or withheld. But we still hang the lights. We talk about "this time of year" as if the tree going up changes the way time feels.

In his most famous picture, a man pushes a rock up a hill, knowing it will roll back down and that there is no end point where the work will be done. Camus will not look away from that repetition; he wants us to pause and see it how it is. December is a softer, more homely version of the same pattern. We tell ourselves that this year will be different: things will be ready to go early, the time around the table will be free of interruptions, and the distance between us and the people we love will be closer this year. But that never happens. After all the pushing, the rock rolls back down.

Camus does not provide a method to enhance the world's benevolence. He does not want to be comforted easily. Instead, he stays in the moment after the illusion breaks, when someone finally realises that the universe does not care and that there is no hidden logic that will save them from this truth.

III. The Season Inside the Machine

Byung-Chul Han in The Burn Out Society writes about tiredness. Tiredness that comes from not being able to stop wanting and not being able to say no to yourself. The external “you must” of disciplinary society has slipped into an internal “I can” and “I want to”, the positivity drives the subject to exploit itself until it burns out. As we approach the festive time of year, we take a look at how we live in a distilled version of this tiredness.

December is a time for rest and reunion, but for most people, it brings a complicated set of expectations: plan the gatherings, deal with family drama, pick the right gifts, go to the right places. The days before the holiday are full of lists and plans, the days of the holiday are full of love and thanks, and the days after are full of fear that it didn't meet expectations.

Han describes rituals as “to time what a home is to space… [they] render time habitable,” “rooms” in the day that “organise time” and make it meaningful; the time of the festival, for him, is “time standing still”^[3], time that does not run out. In that sense, a ritual is a structured break in time that lets us step out of the flow of work and into a shared moment. And, in that sense we might say a festival is a time when nothing is being optimised or improved, with the point being just being together.

As we enter the festive season, there is a kind of sense that this is being turned into a captive festival. This is evident in the endless sales, the emotional connection to every advertisement, and the portrayal of the perfect family as the ultimate standard. The festive season, once a time that was around to be a shared experience, is now a stage for everyone to show their happiness.

The pull into this societal expectation is shaped by a thousand soft imperatives: the fear of missing out on a deal, the hope of learning how everyone else is doing it, and the worry that their own quiet, imperfect celebration might not be enough. Scrolling through Christmas posts and sales catalogues is not only about purchasing items; it also serves as a means to monitor your own performance and compare it to perceived norms.

The cruel side to this bright arrangement is that the failure feels personal when the pressure is held within. If the season leaves us empty or stressed, we can not blame anyone else or point to a clear oppressor. It is easy to think that we did not plan well, did not set clear boundaries, or did not show enough gratitude.

In his book, Han describes “achievement society” as a “society of self-exploitation,” where the “achievement-subject exploits itself until it burns out,” becoming at once “master and slave in one.” Burnout, is not the result of visible blows from outside, but of this constant, low-level auto-aggression turned inward^[4]. The festival has also been captured in terms of psychology, as another place where we have to act excited while slowly falling apart.

Han's focus on negative feelings like boredom, tiredness, and refusal is so important here. He reminds us that in a society that only values positive emotions, there is no room for people who can not or will not smile on command. In December, this exclusion gets stronger.

For this experience to become real again, for us to return back to the ritual that makes us whole, the symbols don’t have to change. The tree with it’s decorations can stay, the carols keep playing. In fact we can continue to buy gifts and embrace the season. To escape the captive season we would change the mode in which embrace the rituals rather than changing their symbols. The action might remain the same on the outside, but on the inside if we do it with consideration, with a shared approach, the body will feel the difference.

Our intention, in that sense, shapes the way we experience the season.

IV. The Hands Behind Our Holidays

In tribes and small villages it was not a luxury to mark a season, get together around a fire, or trade gifts or food. These were ways to build trust, hierarchy, and a sense of belonging in a world where winter could really kill you. The festivals and rituals born of society were a way for us to exist together, to forge bonds, and to show that we belong to each other. But we can see the changes over the years as our rituals are brought under the thumb of the nameless operatives; the machines built around making money have been tied to the things that connect us together.

Subversively and silently, the economic systems have appropriated our rituals and festivals, building machines around them. A market driven by growth and competition cannot afford to have dead zones during the year. The winter feast turns into "the holiday season", a quarter with its own KPIs. The fear of being left out becomes the fear of missing out on a bargain, a trend, or the perfect family moment.

There is no single person hollowing out our rituals, just a thousand decisions that extend trading hours, tying bonuses to Q4 numbers, and designing platforms that reward our real-time updates. Shareholders who expect growth, algorithms that are set up to maximise engagement, managers who are judged on goals they did not set. They all work together to alter the current below the surface to make the season seem festive, but to make us keep working to feed the machine. Making sure that nothing really rests.

The enemy is not one bad person we can find and get rid of. It is a set of plans that take advantage of our need to belong and our fear of being the wrong kind of person at the edge of the firelight.

If there is any peace to be found in saying this, it is that the holiday stress is not a personal failure. When you feel tired, numb, or quietly angry at the season, it stops being a personal flaw and starts to seem like a normal reaction. It does not fix the structure, and it does not make December innocent again. It does allow us to stop, and focus on the rituals, seek that inner peace inside of us, despite the chaos around us.

V. Stopping in a Season That Won’t

We stand in the snow of The Long Winter. A season where the promise of rest is everywhere, but the structure and systems we have around us no longer allow us to break. It does create a longing for the older times, where peace seemed to be given more freely, but it does not help us in the coming month of chaos and never-ending engagements.

Camus leaves us in front of a hill that will not go away, and Han takes us through a month that has been turned inside out so that even our rest is given in service of the machine. The urge is to cross our arms and say that nothing can be done. The holiday will never really come, the festival is over, and the old winter is gone. But the truth is that we will still be here when December comes around again, still buying food, putting up lights, and going through the rituals.

Rituals are repeated gestures of small actions that become important the more they are done, not the more they are seen. And while we cannot stop the festive machinations turning, we can still find time for those small things to pull us out of the machine for a little while. To pause and look at the tree while not taking a photo, or find time to sit with family and friends. Not all rituals need to be accomplishments outside of ourselves. A hidden ritual is just as important for the soul.

This time of year can feel as if the hill is endless, and the New Year is all but the rock rolling to the bottom again. Trying to pull back little times of meaning, finding hidden rituals, or accomplishing tasks that are not outside of ourselves is not an effort to break the machine; it is not a way to pretend that the hill doesn’t exist. It is understanding that the hill is not holy, that even though the rock is trying to fall back down again, we are able to push it a little further.

Re-framing brings a kind of peace. A sense of control, but it does not solve the ongoing issue that the holiday season has started to erode us from inside, continuing on a year that stretches us thin as the year wanes. Once we realise that our inability to relax during it is not a personal flaw but a sign of the season's capture, we can start to look for places where the break might still be able to sneak back in.

In this case, "stop pushing the rock up the endless hill" does not mean giving up on the hill or pretending it was never there. It means knowing that the hill is not holy. That, by understanding what lies in the “absurd gap” is something that we can see, and maybe build back some rituals that speak to our souls. None of these changes will make the holiday feel real, like the stories we heard as kids. But in these changes there may be room for something like the old winter to come back. It will not be a season that fixes anything, but it will be a short, normal stretch of days when we remember that we were not made just to work and perform.