Many advertise themselves as “UV-free.” This is effectively meaningless. Nearly all of them use LEDs as their light source. LEDs don’t emit any UV, so this is like advertising orange juice as “gluten-free.”17 This phrase is left over from fluorescent light boxes; fluorescent tubes do emit dangerous UV, so they need translucent plastic filters to stop it.

Metamodernism resolves the modernity/postmodernity conflict in favor of reconstruction, collaboration, ambiguity, and engagement.

In the 1960s-80s, American politics shifted from economic to sacredness issues. This damaged public discourse, but created a new two-track class system.

Reminding yourself and others of how bad nihilism is can help maintain the eternalist stance. This is the hellfire and brimstone of eternalist preaching.

Stances—responses to meaning—are unstable thought-patterns. Often we adopt several contradictory ones in rapid succession.

Winter blahs range from barely noticeable to severe. You may just feel a little less motivated in November than May. You might feel vaguely offish in winter. You might feel less ebullience and enjoyment. You might not be quite as creative, or get as much done.

The problems of meaningness we face now are dramatically different from those of the past. We also sense new opportunities, and have new resources.

Nihilistic thinking is slow, repetitive, abstract, general, meta, vague, arrogant, and absolutist. It exalts rationality but violates basic logic.

And, maybe you will find that 10,000 lux is good, but not as much as you’d ideally like. There’s nothing magic about this number. It was the most that was practical using fluorescent bulbs, which were the best lighting technology available when the early research was done. My personal experience, using LEDs instead, is that more than 10,000 lux is better.

You may need a lot of supplementation for that—way more than ordinary indoor lights can produce. Probably also way more than “light therapy lamps” provide.

You can do that—but it will take some work, which the follow-on page explains. It takes much less work than it did a few years ago, because lighting technology keeps improving. And you can start with a quite simple set-up, see how it works for you, and then add to it if—as I suspect—you find you want more.

Accomplishing eternalism would would mean knowing the meaning of everything, and acting accordingly. This is impossible, because there are no fixed meanings.

Meanings are interactions: neither inherent in external objects nor merely mental. They are on-going, collaborative activities.

Eternalism promises complete control over life—but that is an impossible fantasy. Influence through collaboration and improvisation are possible, however.

Abandoning selflessness and egoism equally, we can play with the ambiguous self/other boundary; supple, skillful selfing for successful, satisfying interaction.

Alternatively, consider Oscillococcinum, a homeopathic flu treatment. It has more than 26,000 Amazon reviews averaging 4.7/5.0. We know for sure that Oscillococcinum doesn’t do anything. (As the manufacturer’s spokeswoman said, “Of course it is safe. There’s nothing in it.”) Yet apparently millions of people swear by it. Why do people love treatments that definitely don’t work? No one knows! Fortunately we don’t need an answer, for our purposes. It’s sufficient to know that glowing Amazon reviews of a healthcare product do not imply it has any value whatsoever.

At root, the culture war is not about abortion, gay marriage, or marijuana. It is about shared misunderstandings of the nature of meaning.

“Nihilism is inevitable, but not a problem.” This is mistaken: it makes you miserable and ineffective, and erodes social and cultural capacity.

Fundamentalism is not traditional; it is a modern, countercultural movement, opposed to tradition and to post-modernity.

An example is the SUXIO Light Therapy Lamp (about $20), which is currently the best selling one on Amazon. It draws 12 watts, half as much as the HappyLight, so it may deliver about 300 lux in realistic use. It seems unlikely to me that this has a significant effect. Another way of thinking about this is that a 12W LED produces as much light as a 75W incandescent bulb. Would adding one of those to your workspace make much difference?

Recognizing meaninglessness requires unusual intelligence, courage, and toughness. Nihilist elitism renders you stupid, cowardly, and helpless, though.

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The hippies and the Moral Majority both tried to rescue systematic eternalism—and failed. We live amongst their wreckage.

Less honest advertisers say only that their lamps “produce 10,000 lux,” which is impossible: no lamp produces any amount of lux.16 They don’t say anything about distance. However, in many cases, we can make a good guess about how powerful they are. The Verliux HappyLight draws 24 watts. Inexpensive SAD lamps often do say how many watts they draw, and the amount of light they produce will be nearly proportional.

Eternalism—belief in fixed meanings—makes promises it can't keep. It makes us do stupid, crazy, evil things. And we still love it and keep going back for more.

Mingling mission and materialism attempts to gain both self-indulgent and self-justifying goals—but loses both enjoyment and empathetic joy.

Meaning and meaninglessness, pattern and nebulosity all obviously exist—yet we resist recognizing and admitting this. Why?

It’s possible now to light a whole room like that. What is it like to walk into a room that’s bright as day when it’s fully dark outside at five p.m.? It’s nice. It feels cheerful and uplifting and comforting and energizing—like walking into the sun at the beginning of your vacation.

It’s deluded to think we mostly understand issues of meaning (ethics, purpose, value, politics). Ideologies deliberately create and sustain that illusion.

Analogously, the light dose delivered by most light therapy lamps is practically homeopathic, less than a tenth of what the medical science recommends.

The rationalist theory of justified action leads to nihilism. Understand your activity as a vivid, variegated landscape instead.

“Miserabilism” is the stance that everything is awful. It's confused with nihilism because both entail rage and depression.

The winter blahs are the human version. Seasonal affective disorder is the extreme; those afflicted feel like they want to hibernate, although that’s not possible for humans.

What we want most from meaning is guarantees. Religions, political ideologies, and other eternalist systems promise certainty; but they cannot deliver.

The hippie and Moral Majority movements both developed broad, deep cultures, with innovative approaches to every aspect of life, from music to dentistry.

If it’s quite a way above you, a bright light can illuminate a broader area, so there’s less sense that you are sitting in the dark with a bright light shining only on your face. Subjectively, the experience seems much more natural. I think this is due to the peripheral vision effect: bright light spread over the whole of your retina is more effective than the same amount concentrated in a small area. There’s only about a thousand of the daylight-sensing cells, and I suspect it’s important to stimulate as many of them as possible.

Available ethical theories are either eternalist or nihilist; both are useless. We must recognize that ethics are both nebulous and meaningful.

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Perception that life is not meaningful enough may involve an unrealistic standard; or ways of increasing meaningfulness may help.

YOU NEED MORE LUX. You need industrial strength supplements. A follow-on web page, “Seriously bright light vs. the winter blahs,” explains how, practically, you can get them.

A light like this is not only too weak where you put it, it leaves the rest of the room dark. That feels unnatural, because there are pools of darkness all around it. Most of your peripheral vision doesn’t get the light—and the biology I discussed above, plus my experience and that of others, suggests that it’s peripheral vision that matters.

People with seasonal affective disorder, or just the winter blahs, don’t know whether bright light will work for them, so they’re reluctant to spend much money to find out. Unfortunately, you can’t make a bright enough light at a price people are willing to risk, so most light therapy lamps don’t actually work. That means people try one and decide it’s useless (which it is) and give up.

Meaning is nebulous, yet patterned; meaningfulness and meaninglessness intermingle. Recognizing this frees us from metaphysical delusions.

Not getting enough daylight causes the winter blahs. Supplementing winter daylight with seriously bright indoor light lessens or eliminates the blah.

Cultural atomization—the widespread loss of conceptual coherence—has made serious intellectual work much more difficult in the twenty-teens.

I’m really mad about this; false advertising by the manufacturers has made effective solutions unavailable. Unavailable, that is, unless you are willing to bypass their products altogether and try something quite different—as I explain in the next web page!

Great confusions about meaningness stem from the mistaken assumption that there must be some sort of eternal ordering principle.

Magical thinking—hallucinating causal connections—is powerfully synergistic with eternalism (the stance that everything has a fixed meaning).

On the other hand, if you take a January flight to Hawaii4 and get off the plane around noon, and walk out into the sun, you may have an immediate sense of “Ooooh… yes, THIS is what I needed.” There’s a feeling of instantaneous relaxation and general okayness.

For mammals that need to slow down for winter, what are the seasonal clues? Day length may be the most important one. Depending on your latitude, there are many fewer hours of daylight at midwinter than at midsummer. Unsurprisingly, it seems the same system that synchronizes your brain’s daily cycle by detecting daylight also tells it what time of year you are in.9 Winter sun is also less bright than summer sun (another clue that could be detected by this same system). The angle of the sun in the sky is an additional clue.10 All these also have implications for light supplementation.

When desperate to deny all meanings, we use absurd pseudo-rational, pseudo-scientific, intellectual arguments to justify nihilism.

“Archipelago” is a political model in which everyone can choose what social system to live in. It’s impractical, but points to better solutions.

Eighteen inches is a realistic minimum distance from a lamp. Two feet is comfortable. At eighteen inches, you get less than half as many lux as at twelve. At two feet, you get one quarter.14 In reality, a “10,000 lux! (at twelve inches)” lamp delivers 2,500 lux. Still, that’s five times as much as typical indoor lighting, so it may do something.15

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Utilitarianism promises to eliminate ethical uncertainty, but instead replaces a difficult, messy problem with an impossible, tidy one.

Fluidity addresses the atomization of culture, society, and self with ships that sail the sea of meaning: collaborative, improvised, intimate, and playful.

Do you try to fly somewhere sunny for as much winter vacation as you can get, every year? When you first step outside at your destination, do you feel an immediate sense of enjoyment and relief?

Dualism, nihilism, and monism are the three main approaches to fundamental questions of meaning. This book proposes a better, fourth alternative.

The culture war, political polarization, Baby Boomer bafflement: the unending zombie slugfest pairing the two countercultures of the 1960s-80s.

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Because eternalist delusion is so desirable, we collude to maintain it. To save each other from nihilism, we support each other in not-seeing nebulosity.

Anxiety is a natural reaction to uncertainty. In nihilism, pervasive loss of meaning makes everything uncertain; existential angst is a response.

Mine never got to that point, but it was closer to the bad end than the other. Before I figured out how to chase it away with seriously bright light supplementation, I was quite unhappy every winter, and I couldn’t get much done from November through January. Now, so long as I remember to turn the lights on, I feel normal, upbeat, and productive all winter long.

It seems reasonable that all three factors could be addressed with much brighter light. It seems reasonable that would be more effective. Unfortunately, there is currently no scientific evidence for this, because no one has done the experiment.3

If we could just manage to be ordinary, we would not have the responsibility of living up to our potential. Fortunately, ordinariness is impossible.

Enjoyment of the intertwining dance of nebulosity and pattern is a characteristic texture of the complete stance to meaning.

Materialism says that only mundane purposes like money, sex, and power count. It wrongly rejects higher purposes—but those too are not ultimate.

Peak experiences and the complete stance are similar in texture, but differ in intensity, conceptual content, and causes.

You may remember that your retina has cone cells (which sense color) and rod cells (which pick up fine details of what you are looking at). It turns out that there is a third type of light-sensitive cells in the retina, which aren’t mainly used in vision, but instead just tell the brain whether it is daytime.7 These cells connect directly to the parts of the brain that maintain circadian rhythm (the cycle of day and night), alertness, sleep, and aspects of mood.8

My belief that brighter light is more effective is based on common sense; my personal experience; and the experience of many other people who have written on the internet that it works for them. We could be fooling ourselves. It’s easy to do that—to believe taking a herbal supplement is curing your cold when it’s not, for instance.

With no responsibility to justify universal norms, or for solving social problems, subcultures were freed to play with meanings.

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The biological facts imply that supplementary artificial lights need to include plenty of blue in their spectrum, need to be bright enough to fool the brain into thinking it’s daytime, and should light up your entire visual field rather than just being bright in a small area.

Recognizing the inseparability of nebulosity and pattern gives experience a texture of good humor, and the funny sort too!

However, you may be more comfortable buying something recommended by supposed experts, instead of me. Until recently, the top recommendation on reputable review sites such as Wirecutter and The Strategist, based on interviews with medical specialists, was the North Star 10,000 light box. This is also the only “light therapy lamp” I would recommend, because it’s the only one I’ve found that is bright enough.

A schematic overview of stances regarding the meaningness of the self: non-self, True Self, and intermittently continuing.

An event everyone thinks they remember, but never happened. Science disproved religious theories of meaning, but not meaning itself.

The 1960s-80s countercultures dissolved the boundaries between self and society, ethical and political—setting us up for decades of culture war.

Adequate light supplementation has been a radical improvement in my life, as it has been for some other people. I want to raise awareness of the possibility, and give you the information you need to act on it if it seems like it might be relevant for you.

When I’ve had guests over, some can’t tear themselves away from the brights and just want to bask in them all day.5 Several times in winter, people from the neighborhood have rung the doorbell in the evening to say “Uh, sorry to intrude, but—your house always has this radiance pouring out from the front window, and, well, we couldn’t help wondering how you do that!” And I showed them the set-up, and they looked so wistful and said “thank you… that is wonderful… we couldn’t do that.”

In the face of undeserved suffering, is difficult not to fall into the stance that most things are God’s will, but not the horrible bits.

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Most mammal species slow down during the winter.6 They are much less active, sleep much more, and eat as much as they can when they can get it, because food supplies are unpredictable. Hibernation is an extreme of this.

Fear of contamination by the messiness of reality—always changing and ambiguous—motivates dualism, the stance that denies connection.

We have a choice of explanations: ones that are simple, clear, harmful, and wrong; or ones that are complex, vague, helpful, and approximately right.

What is the meaning of an extra-marital affair—or any relationship? A philosophical short story illustrates the puzzle of the nebulosity of meaningness.

Thought suppression is a ploy for maintaining faith in non-existent meanings. It leads to deliberate stupidity, inability to express oneself, and inaction.

The fundamental method for resolving problems of meaning: by finding nebulosity, pattern, and their inseparable relationship.

Whether you think you are a nihilist, or think you are not—I think you are mistaken. Nihilism is impossible—but so is avoiding it.

This is fascinating to me, but if you’re not so interested in why bright light supplementation works, you can skip ahead to the practical “How to make bright light supplementation work for you” section.

Most light therapy lamps are less bright than the Carex. Wirecutter bafflingly recommends the Verilux HappyLight Luxe ($70). It delivers 10,000 lux at six inches. (Imagine keeping a lamp six inches from your eyeball for any length of time!) That implies 1,250 lux at eighteen inches (a realistic minimum) or 625 lux at two feet (more likely the way it would get used in practice).

Lux are the measure of how much light you get. Summer sunlight is about 100,000 lux. An overcast winter day is 1,000 to 2,500 lux. This is a huge difference! It may not be so obvious because our eyes’ irises open and close to partially—but not completely—compensate.

There’s a tragedy here. We have a marketplace filled with hundreds of different products, of which the North Star is quite possibly the only one that works.

Subsocieties, close-knit social groups organized around subsocieties: a possible model for positive future social oganization.

Adequate supplementation means getting something more like 100,000 lux than 1,000. The medical recommendation for SAD treatment is 10,000 lux for at least half an hour each morning. I’ve found I need more than that.

Lux is a measure of how much light you get. It is not a measure of how much light a lamp puts out. How much light you get depends on how much it puts out, but also on how close you are to it. You would have to be unrealistically close to most SAD lamps to get the 10,000 lux they advertise.

Eternalism promises everything you could want from meaning: safety, support, certainty, reassurance, and control. Solid ground!

Doctors recommend bright light therapy as the standard treatment for SAD. This is on the right track, but I have two objections.

Wistful certainty is a ploy for reinforcing eternalism based on the thought that there must exist whatever it takes to make eternalism seem to work.

Daylight contains a lot of blue light, which is critical, due to the biology I described above. Daylight is “5600 K”—a measure of how much blue light it has, roughly speaking. Many inexpensive SAD lights are “3000 K” (almost no blue light) or “4000 K” (significantly less blue than daylight). This alone probably means they don’t work. I discuss this problem further here.

Realizing that eternalism will always fail can result in anguish, pessimism, depression, stoicism, alienation, apathy, exhaustion, and paralysis.

Would it make a difference for you? Unless you experience severe depression, science is silent. We know it works for that, but regular winter blahs? There’s little data. And, you shouldn’t take my word for it; I’m some random guy on the internet.

This final section explains why most SAD lamps are unlikely to do much (if anything). That may lead you to consider seriously the better alternatives.

Forcing fixed meanings on experience always eventually results in unpleasant shocks when reality refuses to conform to your pre-determined categories.

Modernity was built on certainty in science and mathematics. That was revealed as delusional during the early 20th century.

When nebulosity becomes obvious, eternalism fails to fit reality. You can armor yourself against evidence, and arm yourself to destroy it.

Existentialism, a hopeful alternative to rigid meanings, makes wrong metaphysical assumptions, and cannot work. It collapses inevitably into nihilism.

Or maybe you’d do well to consider something that will deliver the medically recommended dose under the conditions you’d realistically use it in.

10,000 lux is the amount aimed for in most scientific research on bright light therapy. Experts in the field continue to recommend 10,000 lux as the appropriate dose. Most research has been done with “light boxes,” which are metal cabinets, two feet by a foot in front, stuffed full of fluorescent tubes of the sort used in schools and offices before LED lighting came in. The North Star light box duplicates that.

The method for resolving confusion about meaning through accepting nebulosity is not a general dialectic, or logic for resolving all false oppositions.

The book is a work in progress; pages marked ⚒︎ are under construction. This site also contains standalone essays that are not part of the book, plus a metablog of news and commentary. You can read recent comments and join the discussion.

You can get a sense too from the picture at the top of this web page. This was a rig I built in 2016, using less good technology than is available now, but you can see that in a dark living room the workstation is lit so brightly that the camera’s image washed out. I wasn’t able to measure it directly, but I estimated 25,000 lux.

Agonizing over whether you are ordinary or special—or feeling smug about one or the other—can be resolved by choosing to be noble instead.

At the other end of the spectrum, for some it means crippling depression that requires urgent medical treatment to avoid hospitalization or worse.

Critically, these cells sense sky blue light; they don’t pick up on other colors much. They are highly sensitive to just how bright the light is. And, they are absent in the fovea (the center of your vision), but are roughly evenly spread across the rest of the retina (like peripheral vision). These make sense for a daylight sensing system!

Countercultures defined as new, alternative, universalist, eternalist, anti-rational systems: there were two in the late 20th century.

These light boxes deliver 10,000 lux at a distance of two feet from your eyes. That is a realistic distance for a light on your desk.

What happens for you when it’s been a few overcast winter days in a row, and then suddenly the sun comes out early one afternoon?

Resolving the twin delusions that nothing is sacred and that the only sacred things are those designated by some authority.

Unfortunately, it costs more than three hundred dollars, which probably seems like too much to most people. I’d guess that’s the reason the review sites have dropped it as a recommendation. It is too expensive. The second web page in this series explains how you can get more light than the North Star 10,000 for less than $100, using lamps made for other purposes.

Need help with an application? From custom lights to application assistance, we are here to help you find the right light for your needs.

From the point of view of the complete stance, monist eternalism fails on its own terms. It cannot deliver what it promises.

In winter, do you turn on all the lights, even when you don’t need them to see what you are doing? And maybe housemates wonder why? And maybe you secretly wish there were a few more lights you could put on?

Resolving a false dichotomy between unrealistic views: being a helpless victim and being totally responsible for your circumstances.

Honest SAD lamp marketing specifies the distance at which they deliver 10,000 lux. The current expert recommendation, replacing the North Star, is the Carex Day-Light Classic Plus ($143 as of late 2023).13 It delivers 10,000 lux at twelve inches. I suggest you get a ruler, sit at your desk, put one end of the ruler next to your eye, and see where twelve inches reaches. You will find that it is not realistic that you’d put a lamp there. If you did, it would be quite difficult to do anything, even reading.

Nihilism says nothing means anything—but no one actually believes that. Lite nihilism weakens the claim, to make it plausible.

Playfulness, which recognizes the mingled pattern and nebulosity of meaning, is a characteristic texture of activity in the complete stance.

How and why modernity failed. All systems of meaning—religious, political, artistic, psychological—began to fall apart. Nihilism seemed the only alternative.

“10,000 lux!” proclaim all SAD lights. This is the main misleading claim. Nearly none of them can deliver that in reality.

Brains automatically find meaning and pattern; we need them to act. Unfortunately, brains also find meaning and pattern where there are none.

Dividing purposes into higher and mundane, mission pursues higher ends and rejects pragmatism; materialism seeks only selfish goals. Both are mistakes.

When eternalism lets you down, you are tempted to make a bargain with it. Eternalism will behave itself better, and in return you renew your faith in it.

The main supplementation strategy is to fool your brain into thinking it’s summer by simulating daylight for twelve-plus hours, centered around the middle of the day. This means adding daylight-like light before the actual dawn, and/or after dusk.11 Depending on circumstances, adding bright light in the middle of the day may help too. I turn my bright lights on as soon as I wake up, and as soon as it starts to get dark outside, and also during the rest of the day if it’s gloomy outside. I typically wake around 6 a.m., and run the lights until about 8 p.m, for a roughly fourteen hour artificial day length.

Finding the specifics of life unacceptable motivates the escapist fantasy of monism: the stance that All is One, denying diversity.

Social, cultural, and personal fluidity create vessels to navigate the ocean of atomized meanings, steering between nihilism and eternalism.

According to dualist gloss eternalism, monism is wrong because it falsely claims that it is possible to achieve union with God.

Mystification uses thoughts as a weapon against authentic thinking. It creates glib, bogus metaphysical explanations that sweep meaninglessness under the rug.

The medical profession calls severe winter blahs seasonal affective disorder (SAD). Officially, to count as SAD, you have to meet the criteria for “major depressive disorder,” which is quite bad. Informally, though, many laypeople refer to any degree of winter blues as “SAD.”

Monist eternalisms—the New Age and SBNR, for example—say everything is meaningful, but leaves vague what the meanings are.

Nihilism is the wrong idea that nothing is meaningful, based on the accurate realization that there is no external, eternal source of meaning.

Specialness is a sense of having been picked out for destiny by the Cosmic Plan. That causes you and others much trouble.

The North Star is closely modeled on the light boxes used in the original 1980s research on seasonal affective disorder. That makes it a conservative choice: we know it works—somewhat, for some people, at least. It’s much brighter than anything else sold for light therapy now. I had one very much like it in the early 2000s,12 and I can also confirm personally that it did work—somewhat. I’d say it restored about a third of my typical winter mood and productivity loss. I have found better solutions, discussed in “Seriously bright light vs. the winter blahs.”

People who suffer from seasonal affective disorder tend to develop longer-than–24-hour circadian cycles, resulting in “permanent jetlag,” with difficulty waking and difficulty getting to sleep at a regular hour. Sufficiently bright light first thing in the morning has been shown to fix this.

There is pretty good scientific evidence that moderately bright light effectively treats both mild “winter blues” and major clinical depression.2 This is now quite widely known, and bright light therapy is the mainstream medical recommendation.

The choiceless mode of understanding meaning has no “becauses.” Explanations are unnecessary because you are unaware of any alternatives.

It is attractive to think that we each have a unique, transcendent, ultimate purpose in life. Unfortunately, this belief is both false and harmful.

The sun is much lower in the sky in winter. I know of no scientific evidence, but subjectively this seems to contribute significantly to the blahs. I have also found that arranging artificial bright light so that it comes from well above eye level makes it more pleasant and more effective.

The global internet atomizes cultures, societies, and selves into tiny brilliant shards. Meaning has lost context and coherence. Now what?

Typical indoor lighting is 100–500 lux. That means a conventionally “brightly lit room” gives you less than one percent as much light as summer sun. You cannot adequately supplement your light needs by merely doubling the number of lamps you have, or by putting 120 watt bulbs in place of 60 watt ones.

For example, my spouse’s winter blahs are usually quite mild, and can be reversed with about half as much light as I need. That’s still much more than you can get from ordinary household lighting. (The next page explains how you can get it.)

Participation is the recognition that both boundaries and connections are both nebulous yet real; neither objective nor subjective.

I recommend against buying anything sold as a “light therapy lamp” or “SAD light.” They are underpowered, overpriced, and the advertising claims made for them are misleading, bordering on fraudulent—as I’ll explain at in the next section.

While the meaning of “objective” is nebulous, learning to relate to meaningness more objectively is possible and worthwhile.

Nihilism relies on three emotional strategies to deny meaning: rage, intellectualization, and depression. It also causes anxiety.

Taking a supplement, though, seems natural. Most people don’t get enough magnesium in our diets, and taking magnesium supplements is sensible. Maybe most Americans—except in the southernmost states—and most Europeans don’t get enough light in winter. So, taking a supplement seems sensible.

For me, at least, it is not primarily affective (meaning about mood). My brain slows down after the equinox, and—without supplementation—by early December it’s impossible to get anything done. I used to get depressed in winter, but I think that’s mostly because I was upset not to be able to think properly or to accomplish anything.

The SUXIO has 1,488 ratings, averaging 4.3/5.0 stars. What are we to make of that? There are many possible explanations. Charitably, maybe the scientific research wildly overestimated how much light it takes to reverse SAD. Uncharitably, the ratings may be spam commissioned by the manufacturer.

Failure to find new foundations for meaning, to recognize diversity, to provide community, and to transcend opposition: all doomed counterculturalism.

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The Religious Right and New Age Left both promoted time-distorting meta-myths—imaginary past golden ages and implausible future utopias—to hide their defects.

In the last few years, biologists have discovered most of an explanation for how this works. These discoveries have significant implications for the kind of lighting that is most effective for supplementation, and how best to use it.

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The subcultural era (1975-2000) recognized the diversity of meanings, and provided a new type of supportive, voluntary social group.

The delusion that we are, or can be, totally responsible for reality is prevalent in some religious and psychotherapeutic circles.

Purity is an obsessive focus for dualist eternalism. It mobilizes emotions of disgust, guilt, shame, and self-righteous anger.

Romantic rebellion does not seriously try to overthrow the system; it is faux-heroic posturing. It can be harmful, but also inspires great art.

Relatedly, it’s important to not expose yourself to bright light, and especially not to blue light, after your artificial dusk time (8 p.m. in my case). That messes up your circadian rhythm, makes it hard to get to sleep, and appears to cause depression directly (in mice, anyway). I recommend using a setting or app on all of your screen devices that cuts blue light in the evening. (On Apple devices, this is called “Night Shift,” and you can find it in the Settings menu.) Set this for a custom schedule that matches your artificial day length, rather than using its default, which is the local natural day length. Eliminating the blue in the screen makes everything look orange, like sunset, which tells your circadian rhythm system it’s time to wind down.

Fluidity recognizes that you have selves, rather than being a self, and that the self/other distinction is nebulous though patterned.

There seems to be wide individual variation in how much light people need to feel normal, happy, and productive.1 I would guess how much light you need corresponds to how bad your winter blahs get. (There’s no science on this yet.)

Eternalism fixates meaning; nihilism denies it. Recognizing that meaning is both nebulous and patterned resolves this false dichotomy.

But, maybe I and others who believe very bright light is more effective for us are fooling ourselves. Maybe we are like the people who take Oscillococcinum whenever they get a sniffle. Until someone sciences this, we can’t be sure.

Nihilism defends itself from the obviousness of meanings with spurious intellectual arguments. Here’s how to dispel them.

The hippie counterculture was structurally and functionally similar to the Moral Majority Christian Right counterculture a decade later.

Many SAD lights advertise themselves as “full-spectrum.” This is a term with no specific definition. It is meant to suggest that the light emitted is similar to daylight—but that is actually false.

Representationalism tried to exorcise the ghost in the machine, but succeeded only in splitting it into innumerable tiny ghosts.