Things I Learned While Looking Up Other Things! “Thermochauvinism is the (often unconscious) assumption that it’s reasonable to live in cold places but unreasonable to live in hot ones.”
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Comments 2
This is an interesting one. Not only have I lived my entire life in the Northeast, but much of it has been in the far northern, extremely cold winter climates of Northern New York/Thousand Islands and Central Vermont. (The linked article cited Vermont's weather "weirdness.") It's natural to me. And for the most part, I can bundle up in layers and enjoy a crisp sunny winter day more than I can an oppressively hot summer day; you can only shed so many layers.
Yet every year I look at all the gear, the two-season wardrobes, the snowplows going by scraping the potholed pavement and flinging salt, and there's an absurdity to it all. Add in the short, dark days in the winter (but we get all that long day energy in the summer!) and the impacts of cold, dry air on my health as I get older and I totally get why people flee south to more temperate climates.
The summers here are great. And I've had the conversation with myself that moving south just trades a heating season for a cooling season.
But...there's more to it than hot & cold. Isn't there data showing that all that heat makes people...a bit crazy, with higher crime rates in the southern states? And the politics...
If it was just a matter of weather, warmer climate US states would be more appealing.
Very much appreciated the linked article this time of year in Vermont, though!
This is so funny to me, because I have the exact opposite view, so much so that I had to read the definition twice. Surely it must say, "unreasonable to live in cold places"! Nope.
Back when I was choosing my undergrad location, I refused to look at any universities north of Virginia, because I deemed anything up in the north to be intolerably cold. I grew up in coastal NC, where the air is like hot soup or a sweaty hug, and now I long for it. Summers in western Oregon, where I now live, are insufficiently hot (it just doesn't feel like summer!) and the air is so dryyyyy. (People almost universally considered paradise here in the summer.) It's fascinating what feels normal - and how much that is shaped by one's formative years.
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