Greentext

My wife doesn’t love multi day backpacking. But she loves the glimpse of how I am and how we are - during that time.

Our priorities - Stay warm, stay dry, fetch and purify water, hike the right distances to get out with food in hand, packing and unpacking our gear, avoid dangerous wildlife, cook, sleep.

When every day that’s your goal state it’s super simple - stress is actually just a response to things that might kill you again. And not 20 steps away from it. “I might perform poorly, my clothes might not be appropriate for the job, I’m running 3 minutes behind - which may cost me my job, which could be long term, and financially we won’t recover, and then we might lose the house or starve”. Up against “I need water and dry clothes”.

Chop wood, carry water.

I think the reason it's not a problem is there's agency you can take over that stuff, and it's not deferring to a blatantly malevolent system designed to crush you into dust and extract the value for things like sleeping inside and getting the ever diminishing treats that make you not kill yourself while you're doing that.

whereas when it's cold your body does stuff by itself to heat up, and there's usually more you can do besides to fix or at least emotionally cope with the problem in healthy ways-warm clothes, blankets, wood chopping, chimney maintenance, something inadvisable with nichrome wire, etc. When you're fighting a nazi, you have to be moving or carefully still, and the moving actually matters and maybe you kill or escape the nazi before it kills you. your actions actually matter, even if the base situation is more outwardly harrowing.

there's no cognitive dissonance to survival issues, no worrying about how you're seen, no helleresque bullshit. nothing even stopping you from acting but your own assessments.

Indeed, the majority of us aren't made to worry about arbitrary problems that are beyond our control constantly more than trivial and survival related problems.