Tom
e25b2c05d1
Theory revised and narrowed to what the evidence supports; renamed The
Relevance Theory. Project split into two books and six essays, with the
three-tier relevance model promoted to the flagship.
- EVIDENCE.md claims sorted into four tiers, governs what may be claimed
- CRAFT.md lyric/landscape register, governs how it may be said
- PORTFOLIO.md the two-book plus six-essay split, and what was cut
- BOOK_ONE_CHAPTERS.md walk spine on the Stezka Ceskou Kanadou,
beats for all 14 units, argument ledger
- FIELD_BRIEF.md what to capture on the trail
- drafts/ prologue, ch 3, ch 5 (register tests, specifics are placeholders)
- archive/ original theory and outline, unchanged
Cut: the foreign-policy argument, the weight-loss protocol, the diagnostic
scoring, the I/me labels, the seasonal network mapping (demoted to metaphor
in Book Two).
6.9 KiB
Book Two — Seasonal Intelligence
Designing a Year You Can Live In Czech: Sezónní inteligence: Jak si navrhnout rok, ve kterém se dá žít
Length: 60–70k words · 10 chapters Write after: Book One, and after a year of collecting the case studies Part III needs.
The reframe — read this before anything else
The original version claimed the DMN/TPN/SN cycle maps onto the calendar year. It doesn't, as far as anyone knows, and the closest real evidence points elsewhere: Meyer et al. 2016 found attention-related brain activity peaking near the summer solstice and working-memory activity near the autumn equinox — a seasonal pattern, but not yours. And the seasonality of mood is itself contested: Traffanstedt et al. 2016 found no relationship between depression and season, latitude, or sunlight in a large sample.
So the book cannot be "your brain has seasons."
It becomes: every society before ours built structure into the year; we flattened it; rebuilding it is a design choice worth making. Cultural history and practical design, honest that it is a proposal rather than a finding.
This is a stronger book, not a weaker one. "Here is a structure worth adopting" needs no neuroscience to justify it and cannot be falsified out from under you. It also opens a real gap: Katherine May's Wintering is memoir, Jenny Odell's Saving Time is critique, and neither hands the reader a year to actually build.
The seasonal/network mapping survives as an explicitly labelled design metaphor — a way of naming four modes of work and giving them a place in the calendar. Declare it as metaphor in chapter 5 and never let it drift back into a claim.
Part I — The Flattened Year
1. The Year That Had Shape
What a pre-industrial European agricultural year actually contained: not four moods, but wildly different kinds of labour, sociality, diet, and obligation in each part. Be concrete and unromantic — winter was mending, slaughtering, weaving, and often hunger; it was not a season of contemplative rest for anyone. The structure was real; the serenity is a modern projection.
2. Ritual as Infrastructure
Feast, fast, harvest, fallow. Why every society marked the year, and what the markers did — synchronising a community, licensing rest, bounding effort, ending things. Cross-cultural, with the Slavic and central European calendar as the home ground you can write from directly.
The functional argument: rituals were the interface to seasonal structure. Remove them and the structure becomes invisible even where it still exists.
3. How We Flattened It
Artificial light, climate control, global supply chains, the fiscal year, the modern work calendar. Not a decline narrative — most of these are genuine goods and the book should say so loudly. But we removed the year's structure as a side-effect of removing its hardships, and never asked whether the structure was doing anything on its own.
4. The Middle of the Night
Handle the dispute openly — it's the best part. Ekirch's documentation of segmented sleep in pre-industrial Europe; Yetish et al.'s finding of no such pattern in three equatorial pre-industrial societies; Ekirch's response that he never claimed universality.
The chapter's real subject is what that argument reveals: a habit we assumed was human nature turns out to be Western European and historically local. Which is the book's thesis in miniature — the structures we lost were cultural inventions, not biological defaults, and that makes them things we can deliberately rebuild rather than things we must recover.
Part II — Four Modes, Four Seasons
Explicitly a design metaphor. Say so at the top of chapter 5 and again whenever it strains.
5. Why Four
The honest chapter. Here is what the evidence supports (the brain varies across the year; light affects physiology), here is what it doesn't (this specific mapping), and here is why a four-part structure is still worth adopting: not because it is discovered, but because a year with named parts is easier to live in than a year without them, and four is the division our culture already carries.
Address the latitude problem head-on: this is an argument about temperate, seasonal, northern-hemisphere life, and it does not generalise to the equator. Owning that limitation in chapter 5 is worth more than pretending to universality.
6. Winter — Integration and Closure
Not new beginnings. Reflection, consolidation, repair, finishing. Why January is a poor time to launch a changed life — as a design and cultural argument, not a neurological one. Winter rituals across cultures.
7. Spring — Orientation
Looking outward again. Light commitments, low-cost experiments, learning without deliverables. Why spring beginnings recur in so many calendars.
8. Summer — Output and Freedom
Long light, high energy, sociability, the season of making things. The traditional vacation season, and the question of whether we placed rest correctly.
9. Autumn — Harvest and Delivery
Narrowing, completing, documenting, letting go. Closure as maintenance rather than as loss.
Part III — Building the Year
Needs real case studies. This is what the year between Book One and Book Two is for — interview consultants, small-business owners, school-teachers, and parents who already run seasonal rhythms, formally or not.
10. A Year You Can Actually Build
The applied chapter, absorbing the old Part III entirely. Personal year design; the team and organisational version; the fiscal-year misalignment argument (made carefully — as a design critique with evidence from real organisations, not as a claim about brains); families and the school year; and the question of what to do when your employer owns your calendar.
End on the honest constraint: most readers cannot restructure their working year. What they can restructure is what they expect of themselves in each part of it, and that alone is most of the benefit.
Conclusion — Rhythm as a Choice
Not nostalgia, not escape, not a claim that our ancestors were wiser. A year with shape is a thing you can build inside a modern life, and the reason to build it is that the alternative — a year that is one long undifferentiated stretch of the same expectation — is a very recent experiment that nobody chose and nobody has evaluated.
Appendices
- Seasonal planning templates: individual, team, leadership
- A seasonal festival calendar: Slavic, central European, secular, universal
- Further reading
Standing rules for this book
- No brain-state claims about seasons. The metaphor is declared once and stays a metaphor.
- Meet the contested seasonality evidence in chapter 5, before a skeptical reader can raise it. Never bury it.
- Unromantic about the past. Pre-industrial winters were hard. The argument is about structure, not about a lost golden age — and the book is far more persuasive for saying so.
- Northern temperate, and admit it.