Late Summer Warnings

I try not to make any big decisions in August.

There is an ancient tradition of warning against this month. The Romans called them the dog days. The Greeks blamed Sirius, the bright star that rises in late summer, calling it an evil sign. Hippocratic physicians treated its rising as a medical event and advised doctors to proceed carefully until it passed.

Homer makes the same association in the Iliad. As Achilles comes for Hector, his bronze armor gleams like Sirius, “glittering brightly yet boding ill, bringing fever to wretched mortals.”

Is it just the heat?

August is hot, sure, but July is hot too. So is June. What makes August worth singling out? It’s not the heat itself. The sun is already weakening after June.

The real issue is accumulation.

By August you have been running hot for over ninety days. You are fully used to summer and still carrying its hidden costs. Like someone seeing a mirage after weeks in the desert. This produces the peculiar phenomenon of clarity. Sometimes false, sometimes real.

You take a look at your job, your relationships or your life and you start having thoughts about change. Should you make a change? Maybe. But maybe not.

European cultues has the right instinct to August, take a month off. Suspend judgment.

You see people in August start to have grand plans on changing their life.

The problem is America has no real August holiday. It should have at least one, maybe 2. Getting everyone to September when the accumulation has ended would greatly enhance mental health.

That’s because strange things happen with accumulation.

Crime spikes in late summer. People filing for divorce spike in August. Then they spike again in March. March is the month winter has accumulated, ninety days of dark and cold. People do not break under bad weather. That’s easy to handle. They break under the accumulation.

Functional Superstition

The August warning is just one functional superstition. History has a lot of them.

The Greeks blamed Sirius but Sirius does not bring fever. They were wrong about the cause and right about the effect. This happens a lot. Consider the simple rule against walking under a ladder.

This superstition has been around for an extremely long time. What’s really going here? Is it magic to walk under a ladder?

No. but if you are walking under ladders the environment is probably chaotic. Someone will fall directly if you’re walking on ladder. We all know that.

But it’s also a chaos detector. A site where people walk under ladders is a site where other corners are being cut, the disaster will arrive later, in the building. It will collapse and people will die.

Cumulative culture put a curse on the behavior so people would avoid the hazard without needing an OSHA regulator to explain the safety logic.

The Eternal Summer of Calvin and Hobbes

Calvin and Hobbes was a comic strip about the feeling of late summer. A forever August.

Calvin spends wide-open afternoons with a tiger, a wagon, and enough unstructured time to invent whole universes. Yet the strip constantly reminds us that this freedom carries an expiration date. The looming start of school and his parents interrupt him constantly. That captures the late-summer feeling, life briefly opens up, while you realize how quickly it will close again.

The comic is surprisingly dark, mirroring the strangeness of late summer. Watterson named his boy after John Calvin, who believed God fixed human fate from the start, and his tiger after Thomas Hobbes, who declared life nasty, brutish, and short. The adults aren't villains, but none of them make a compelling case for growing up.

The actual man Bill Watterson lived the comic. He was Calvin. He didn’t want to be bothered. At the height of his success, Watterson stopped drawing it. He refused the licensing empire around it and withdrew from the public life. He became the real Calvin. He didn’t want to be bothered. No wonder the strip was so popular. Both adults and children recognize something real in it, something hard to fake. Some of the best art is lived.

But Calvin and Hobbes is still a child's dream. You cannot live in civilization without being bothered. Adult life means obligations. Regular people must rely on smaller, daily mechanics to keep life from closing around them, certain rules to maintain sanity. Many of them survive as old warnings that sound more superstitious than philosophical.

I’m Busy

Seneca noted that while people guard their money fiercely, they hand over their time without a thought. They would not give a stranger five dollars, yet they freely surrender entire afternoons to anyone who asks.

To protect your time, you have to tell people you are busy.

Watch what happens to the man who admits he is not busy.

At work, his coworkers look at him with suspicion. His bosses question why they hired him. An employee with free time is either hiding something or about to be given something.

In many relationships, a woman sees a man at total ease as a huge turn-off. They see a complete lack of ambition. A man who stays constantly available can quickly lose the stature in his girlfriend’s eyes, regardless of his financial stability or preferences.

That is why unbusy men often make themselves look busy.

Even with male friendships, looking busy is important. Past a certain age, male friendship become partly a comparison exercise. Men measure their lives against each other. This is why the best friendships involve activities. So you’re focusing on something external. Not comparing lives.

Tell your friend you are always relaxed and you may have handed him an insult. Tell him you are busy and you have handed him an excuse. Busy lets everyone leave the conversation with their dignity intact. You may be successful, but at least you are paying for it.

Neighbors and Roommates

Schopenhauer once offered a simple story about human closeness. the Porcupine’s Dilemma.

It’s from the german philosopher Schopenhauer. On a cold winter's day, a number of porcupines huddle together for warmth. Their quills prick, and they pull apart. The cold drives them back in. The quills drive them out again. Tossed between the two evils, they finally discover the distance at which they can tolerate one another.

Notice that they discover it. No porcupine calculates the correct distance in advance. They find it by overshooting, by getting close enough to hurt, enough times to learn where the line lies. The distance humans finally settle on, Schopenhauer observed, is politeness and good manners.

The art of living alongside others requires finding that moderate distance. Close enough to share the warmth, far enough to avoid the quills. This is why people make better neighbors than roommates.

Living with someone demands constant, active virtue, patience, cleanliness, emotional restraint, and endless compromise. Living near someone requires almost nothing. The physical space does the heavy lifting. Your neighbor’s bad mood happens inside his own house. He can be a miserable man to his family, yet remain completely pleasant to you, because you only meet him for two hours with a clear exit strategy.

What often happens is that people substitute virtue for distance. It’s easier to be good when you have your own space and are comfortable at a distance from other people.

The ancients understood what happens when those boundaries collapse. Plautus wrote that no guest remains welcome past three days. Benjamin Franklin modernized the thought with a sharper line: “Fish and visitors smell in three days.”

Yet the guest doesn't actually rot. He remains the exact same man on day three that he was on day one. You simply tire of him because he has crossed an invisible boundary. He has migrated from a neighbor, someone you enjoy in controlled doses, to a roommate, whose presence you must endure without a buffer.

It leads to a simple, functional rule for getting along with the world:

If you can't keep your distance, you have to be good. If you can’t be good, at least keep your distance.

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