We spend months covering up, checking the weather, losing and forgetting umbrellas cursing against the gray skyagainst the cold. We get up early for the office, work or school, we are roused from our warm beds by an inexorable alarm clock. We dream of a beautiful season, clear skies and sunshine, afternoons on sunny benches, praying that vitamin D will solve all our problems, heal our hearts and even physical ailments while we’re at it. Then comes the heat, the sun too and… we don’t know what to do anymore. We see others around all the time, parks full of people playing volleyball, gathered around a beach towel on the lawn and… we feel guilty because we don’t feel the same impulse because after months of praying for warmth, light and sun we want just stay home.
Solar guilt: a generational problem?
Second Nadia Teymoorianpsychologist Moment of Clarity Mental Health CenterThe solar fault it’s exactly that: the feeling of regret and general displeasure we feel every time we stay home on a beautiful day. What makes it worse is the creeping (but not necessarily true) awareness that others are enjoying their lives to the fullest. It doesn’t matter if you feel good or bad, if you’re tired, if it just makes sense for you to stay home and rest: your brain is out, instead your body for some reason does not want to participate in the spring. According to Teymoorian, as if that wasn’t enough, the feeling of guilt worsens when you find yourself in places with fewer sunny days. A sort of seasonal FOMO, in short, that can last all spring and summer and doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It seems in fact that these feelings of guilt, shame or fear that you will lose something they are particularly strong among millennials and Generation Z, so much so that they are also used in marketing to push them to buy or invest.
FOMO and social and social expectations
When I think about it, it is impossible not to attribute some of these negative feelings to social networks, or on the way they are used. Thanks to them (or because of them), when we are not well (physically or mentally), we do nothing but scroll through our feeds and are influenced by everyone’s outdoor activities. Activities that we would never have imagined in a world without social networks. Again, perhaps, without social media we would never have arrived at the definition solar fault which, while useful for identifying an existing problem, fits perfectly into an (extremely social) trend to pathologizeto separate and isolate any negative feeling or impulse, detach from it wider context which is what we should actually learn to look at and then place our innerness within. It is very complicated.
How to navigate spring and summer (and ourselves)
Out of sight, out of mind? Sure, but a problem it’s deeper. Understanding what we really want, what we expect from ourselves and our lives, even in the most mundane everyday activities, is always more complicated. We have very high expectations built into our heads by our context, what we feel like we have to do it. We don’t listen to ourselves enough, we think we want to do exactly what others do, or maybe little more, to win an imaginary race and achieve an imaginary victory that we strongly hope will make us happy. Free yourself from these delusional thoughts it presupposes further reflection, detachment from envy, shame, jealousy and guilt, self-knowledge that is sometimes truly terrifying. However, it is also the only way to break free solar fault and singing societies to live a life that is truly what we want it to be. Even on days when the birds are singing outside and we just want to get some rest.