Tom
e73455d2ca
theory/ EVIDENCE.md + THEORY.md, shared by everything a-days-walk/ Book One: CHAPTERS, CRAFT, FIELD_BRIEF, OUTLINE, drafts/ seasonal-intelligence/ Book Two: OUTLINE essays/ the six pieces archive/ superseded originals, unmaintained by design PORTFOLIO.md the split and the sequence Adds a README to each directory. Cross-references updated to the new layout; archive/ references left broken deliberately, as those are historical documents. Also revises chapter 6 of Book One: the notification scene is now four items rather than four hundred, since the narrator is a light user. The low volume is stronger evidence than a flood would have been - it is the case the attention-economy account cannot explain. Tracked as A26 in the argument ledger, planted in the prologue and chapter 1.
Seasonal Intelligence
Designing a Year You Can Live In Czech: Sezónní inteligence: Jak si navrhnout rok, ve kterém se dá žít
Book Two. 60–70k words, 10 chapters. Outlined, not started.
The reframe — read before touching anything here
The original version claimed the brain's daily 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 activity peaking near the summer solstice and working memory near the autumn equinox. The seasonality of mood is itself disputed — Traffanstedt et al. 2016 found no relationship between depression and season, latitude, or sunlight in a large sample.
So the book is not "your brain has seasons."
It is: every society before ours built structure into the year, we flattened it, and rebuilding it is a design choice worth making. Cultural history plus practical design, honest that it's a proposal rather than a finding.
This is a stronger book, not a weaker one. "Here is a structure worth adopting" needs no neuroscience and can't 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.
Files
OUTLINE.md— the full chapter outline and the standing rules.
Chapter beats to come once Book One's voice is settled. Claims are governed by ../theory/EVIDENCE.md.
This book will need its own craft document. ../a-days-walk/CRAFT.md is specific to the walk and its register won't transfer.
Why it's second
It needs Book One's credibility. It needs the contested seasonality evidence handled carefully. And the chapters most worth writing — the applied work-year material in Part III — need real case studies that don't exist yet.
That's the job for the year between the two books: interview consultants, small-business owners, teachers and parents who already run seasonal rhythms, formally or not. Right now Part III is argument without instances, and it will stay that way until somebody goes and asks.
Standing rules
- No brain-state claims about seasons. The metaphor is declared once in chapter 5 and stays a metaphor.
- Meet the contested seasonality evidence in chapter 5, before a skeptical reader can raise it.
- Unromantic about the past. Pre-industrial winters were hungry. The argument is about structure, not a lost golden age.
- Northern temperate, and admit it. The model dissolves at the equator and inverts south of it.