Fear of Cold
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- Опубликовано: 13 янв 2022
- You are reduced to a crawling thing on the margin of a disintegrating world. Nothing will so quickly isolate a man.
My Patreon: / jacobgeller
My Twitter: / yacobg42
Merch: store.nebula.app/collections/...
“The Cremation of Sam McGee” by Seth Boyer: sethboyer.bandcamp.com/track/...
Based on the poem by Robert W. Service
Audio mastering by Mitch Cramer: / heavyxeyed
SOURCES:
Books:
To Build a Fire (Jack London, 1908)
Alone (Richard Byrd, 1938)
The Stranger in the Woods (Michael Finkel, 2017)
On the Banks of Plum Creek (Laura Ingalls Wilder, 1937)
Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography (Laura Ingalls Wilder, 2014)
The Long Winter (Laura Ingalls Wilder, 1940)
Mountains of the Mind (Robert Macfarlane, 2003)
The Shining (Stephen King, 1977)
Who Goes There? (John W. Campbell, 1938)
Longform Articles:
The Big Thaw: Russia’s Permafrost is Melting: news.sky.com/story/russias-pe...
The Bizarre Bank Robbery That Shook an Arctic Town: www.outsideonline.com/outdoor...
Even At Its End, The Universe Will Never Reach Absolute Zero: www.forbes.com/sites/startswi...
The History of the Robbins Children: www.pioneergirl.com/blog/archi...
Frozen Alive: www.outsideonline.com/2152131...
The Coldest Place in the Universe: www.smithsonianmag.com/scienc...
How the New Science of Freezing Can Save Your Life: www.outsideonline.com/outdoor...
The Ice Inferno: aeon.co/essays/antarctica-a-p...
What the Arctic Reveals about Coronavirus: www.arctictoday.com/what-the-...
The Island Where No One Is Allowed to Die, or Give Birth: www.stuff.co.nz/travel/experi...
This was Ötzi the Iceman’s Last Meal: www.nationalgeographic.com/sc...
Movies and TV: To Build A Fire (David Cobham, 1969) The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982), The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1977), Snowpiercer (Bong Joon Ho, 2013), The Day After Tomorrow (Roland Emmerich, 2004), Little House on the Prairie (Episode 22, 1975)
Games: The Long Dark (2014), Frostpunk (2018), Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020)
Music (chronologically): Theme for The Long Dark (The Long Dark), Un Dia En Granada (Vendla), Watery Grave (Carrion), Helix Bell (Christophe Gorman), One Must Go (Alec Slayne), Doubt (The Long Dark), Freezing Cold (Breath of the Wild), Silent Heaven (Silent Hill 2), Martian Law (Jon Bjork), Ennui (Cody High), Cold New Dawn & The Darkest of Days (Frostpunk), There’s Something I Have to Say (The Long Dark), Canonical Aside (Dead Space 2), A Cold Wind (Savvun), The Cremation of Sam McGee (Seth Boyer)
Additional footage from Getty Images
Additional music and sound effects from Epidemic Sound
Thumbnail by: / hotcyder
Description from “Alone” by Richard Byrd 
Развлечения
Creating this type of video takes a tremendous amount of work; to support more like it and get a peek at behind-the-scenes details, support me at: www.patreon.com/JacobGeller
thank you Jacob
I'm watching from Kalam valley.
that was an absolutely amazing video. i have always thought that your work was unparalleled.
I wrote some notes for a game involving the sun vanishing. It's loosely based on the ARG Thesunvanished, but instead of aliens, it was just a game about how temperatures would continue to plummet, causing all life to cease, those underground to be buried alive, and those strong enough to suffocate as air liquefied.
Hey Jacob, maybe take a look at "Near Death"? It is a barely-known game about an Antarctic station and single pilot on it who struggles to stay alive and leave. It is really short and can be finished in four hours. Really made me think about cold and Antarctic research stations.
I've often thought of a line from Richard Adams' "Watership Down," during the winter. Adams says, to paraphrase, that many people who claim to enjoy winter are wrong. What they enjoy is the feeling of being protected against it. I've often thought about that line when walking around on days where every inhaled breath freezes the hairs inside my nose. There is a great satisfaction in staring the cold in the face, feeling its fingertips reach out, and turning back to a well heated home. It's important to remember how easy it is for that final step to fail.
We do enjoy winter in AZ to be fair, unless you're in the high country like Flagstaff.
While being protected from the cold is cool and all, I disagree. If you come from a warm country, you definitely appreciate the cold.
i live somewhere humid. yesterday it was 46° C. the brainfog, the wetness, the pounding in my skull, my blood boiling and the absolute misery of just breathing made me wish i was freezing to death. id much rather my body was taken by the cold, than have my brain baked inside of my skull, leaking various fluids from every hole in my face until i collapse and die.
It’s a neat concept but I actually enjoy the cold. I often walk out into it with shorts and a T shirt.
@@lessevilnyarlathotep1595 It can get that way in AZ after a monsoon rain storm, 115F and the rain evaporates instantly, then it is like 100% humidity + sun + it is still 115 outside
"The monster might kill them, but the cold will"
What a good line.
Now thats cold
🥶🥶sheeesh
This line sends chill down my spine...
@@dereenaldoambun9158 That line made the contents of my prostate freeze solid.
Gives vibes like Azula saying. “You should think less about the tides, who have already made their decision about killing you, and more about me. Who is still mulling it over.”
Jacob: “True frigophobia, or cryophobia, fear of the cold, is relatively rare.”
Also Jacob: LET’S FIX THAT
I have that , it's fucking scary, sometimes it comes our of nowhere
Why?
@nik07nik how should I know ? It just does ? Same way that some people get anxiety attacks I get this but it's rare and when I do get it I can't move bc everything else is tensed the fuck up bc I'm shivering
It makes perfect sense to fear cold, since we’re more likely to die of exposure to extreme elements, than hunger ( or anything else).
If stranded, the order of operations, for survival is …
Fire
Water
Food.
Also listed as …
Shelter
Water
Food.
Cold is unforgiving, relentless and has no mercy
During the Texas freeze I was living with my partner at his mom's house about 15 minutes from my parents. Each house intermittently had power so we were driving back and forth to bring food and supplies to each other. A pipe burst in my parents house and my brother slipped on the wet tile dislocating his shoulder. He was at the packed ER all night waiting for treatment, so i drove some hot food up to my parents who had to wait in the car outside due to covid restrictions. Driving back, it was late at night and the power was out everywhere for miles leading to my parent's house and in most of the city. Not a single street light, home or business with light. Everything was absolute pitch black like it was deep into the middle of nowhere and i could only see as far as my weak headlights shone. I remember thiking just how chilling it felt to drive down this familiar road that was so deathly still, silent and dark. I felt like I was in a horror game.
Did you vote out the republican majorities that stripped the grid of its ability to function in the cold? You know, punish the ppl that put you through that ordeal? Since you make no mention of it, I'm guessing "nope". gotta keep that gov't out of your business at all costs, amirite
U guys gotta deal with cold and snow better! Shit I live in Philadelphia and it gets at least below -3% every year and we’re not even close to bring the coldest in the lower 48
That's a different perspective. I live in northern Ontario, closest neighbour is 2 km away, at least 50km to the nearest street lights. I'm only familiar driving home in the black.
@@beandaddydoggratt9714I mean... yeah, that's why it was so catastrophic. The winter was way harsher than they were used to, so on a personal and systemic level they didn't have the preparations that a state used to the cold would have. It's easy to go "lmao that winter ain't shit" when you're from a state that has the infrastructure to accommodate, but that was exactly the problem. I'm from Michigan, I've got plenty of coats, but I doubt I'd take a Texas summer all that well.
@@nathanl8622 also dude Im pretty sure the state of Texas doesn’t need you to stand up for them Im tired of people always defending people for no reason it makes me want to trash them more….. Im right they should be more prepared for the cold. U should always be prepared for the worst this isnt a playstation wer talking about here its a power grid in Texas…… how can u even think thats not dumb?
The cold story that has most stuck with me is probably "The Little Match Girl" by Hans Christian Andersen. It is about a girl freezing to death while hallucinating from her matches' fumes which she lights to stay warm.
It's utterly terrifying.
As a child I spent hours thinking about this story. Every time my father would read it to me, I was so absorbed by this little girl's tragedy that I almost felt the icy cold and the bit of warmth from her matches and always was left shaken afterwards even though I'd heard the story a dozen times before. It is tragically haunting and prompted me to start thinking about social inequality and the unfairness of a world that does not care about you. Thank you for reminding me of this great story! I should still have my old copy, it was beautifully illustrated - maybe I should look for it in the attic and put it back on my bookshelf.
@@Lina-nr1ks i remember it not affecting me as a child. Years later i get shivers thinking about it
Why did schools have us read The Little Match Girl as children? Utterly traumatizing
Ah, I was forced to read that one.
I can't believe they had us read that in elementary school.
“He feels his nose begin to freeze, although this doesn’t bother him too much.”
A professor last year explained me that the brain doesn’t register the same pain/cold/hot from your skin after a while that you’ve been feeling it. The brain almost “filter” it because it isn’t something that you can apparently avoid and the body already told you that you’re in danger. She even told the class that she almost lost her nose once because she didn’t cover it in her scarf and hat and etc. while in a very cold place (maybe Siberia…?) and she didn’t even realise it until she got into an house and someone told her that the nose was getting black- she was laughing and we were horrified.
Some people deal with extreme stress with laughter
Cold gets you even before you know it. Our body warns us, but then filter that feeling because its so common to feel that way
@@sandwich1920 While true, the original comment stated that she laughed when retelling the story to her students, not when the event actually happened.
I remember going out to check on the chickens in -12 weather one day, I was lazy and only went out in my housecoat and boots cause it didn’t feel all that cold. Things were going fine until I got into the high snow which my boots flipped up onto the back of my calves, “I’ll brush that off when I get to the coop” I thought. When I was in the coop I wiped the snow off and was horrified to realize I felt absolutely nothing from my calves to my toes. My boots were filled with snow but there was no pain, no discomfort, just complete, total numbness that I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t decided to brush the snow off. Usually when my skin is in direct contact with ice, it hurts like hell and takes a while to become numb, but not this time, and I was only in the deep snow for around 15 seconds. There was no warning I was pushing myself too far.
I didn’t get frostbite that day but I did get a valuable lesson about the cold.
@@sandwich1920 as Novus said she was laughing while recalling the event, but I do agree that it would have been a natural reaction even in that moment!
"Cold itself, in terms of physics, is defined by absence".
This makes cold somehow...Poetic. Like something tragic, but also beautiful, in a very special way. It's like...The quiet, the loneliness, the silence...The stilness. Almost like the real concept of "Nothing", but yet still, there is something.
Just found this channel today and it's just incredible and beautiful.
Thanks.
100 years ago people used to learn Ancient Greek and Latin in high school, now they make comments like these
Indeed.
@@skipumpthajizzgodpeople still learn Ancient Greek and Latin in high school.
@@skipumpthajizzgodand they werent called « thajizzgod »
@@skipumpthajizzgodI don't even know what the intention of this comment is
I used to love the cold…until I actually had to work outside during winter. And all that talk of the cold sneaking up on you is right.
Hot weather is instantly uncomfortable the moment you open the door. But with the cold if you layer up enough you feel like you can take on Lady Winter herself.
Until some hours pass and you realize it hurts to move your fingers under your gloves and there’s an uncontrollable shiver in your chest that thumps like a second heartbeat.
I still like the cold but it’s kinda like getting hurt by a friend. You never forget it.
Your analogy at the end is spot on.
And if you remain, it holds you in its tender, heavy lidded embrace of frigid warmth
Summer tends to be forgiving. You can commit all sorts of blunders, such as wearing wet socks, sweating intensely, and layering poorly, and summer will gladly leave you be. Winter is unforgiving, and harsh. It always exacts a price on whatever blunder you make. I'm always fearful of cold weather. Like you said, hot weather is nice enough to flat out state how its going to be. Cold winter is deceptive.
Look at you kids writing up a storm. Refreshing comments section
Fun fact: in Alaska where I grew up, fire-building and outdoor survival is a required part of the school curriculum. We're taught "To Build A Fire" and "The Cremation of Sam McGee" in schools when we're around 10-11, partly as literature but mostly as survival ed. I remember going through it in class, identifying with the teacher signs of hypothermia, considering where the speaker made mistakes, etc. Eventually it ends with a full semester-long unit on "not dying when you go outside" that caps off with a weekend-long spring trip to the mountains where we're tested on survival skills, with a second trip in 8th grade during the winter that includes ice fishing and starting our own winter fires for real. If the cold is a big part of your life, you treat it with respect...or you die.
If you haven't watched it, I recommed the first season of *The Terror* (AMC). It's based on a real doomed polar expedition in the 1840s--back when a trip to the Arctic felt like a trip to Mars. Stylistically/thematically it's close cousins with The Thing: there's a monster, but what really dooms the men is the cold and lack of resources.
The Terror is absolutely fantastic! To those who don't know it, the tv show is based on a horror book by author Dan Simmons, and although it does indeed have a supernatural creature that is hunting the crew, the weather truly is what dooms them and has a bigger and more oppressive presence in the story. They are constantly suffering, struggling, and dying because of it. The Terror is a great TV show, but I recommend it to anyone who's interested in delving deeper into the dangers of extreme cold.
I had to memorize the Cremation of Sam McGee in grade 4, I definitely don't think that's a child-friendly story haha. I'm from Toronto though, so we don't quite go to those lengths to teach cold survival
In NC, they included basic info about floods, tornados, crossing the street, and stuff like poison ivy. I know some states straight up teach kids about alligators because that's a normal hazard there.
isn't that partly based on the Franklin expedition, where one of the biggest threats was lead poisoning from the water purifiers and malnutrition.
@@HappyBeezerStudios yes to being based on the FE, ehh/studies still on fence as to the impact of lead in the expedition's downfall
This is fascinating to me as a Vietnamese and an Australian. I have never known temperatures colder than maybe five degrees celsius. In my country, cold never kills. In my country and my culture, heat kills. Heat is what makes your local government tell you to check in on your parents; heat is what keeps kids home from school. Heat is what can destroy your health, kill your children, invade your home and make it uninhabitable.
Soon us northerners will be able to relate to you.
omnipotentbanana if you have solid brick or concrete walls that retain heat, meant for keeping you warm during northern winters, and they are stiflingly hot in the summer, you can get a big cooler of icy cold water and use a clean mop to wet the walls in summer. My parents used to do that, and I swear it dropped the temperature inside the house by a couple degrees at least
I live in the Midwest and that sort of cold is becoming less common. Wind-chill is nothing to play with. I've experienced -30 degrees F with wind-chill and that's cold enough to give you frostbite within minutes.
It really is polar opposites. Norwegian here, we have long experience with surviving the cold just fine, but we suffer during really hot summers. Really liked the image of heat invading your home, never thought of it like that.
Pres. Comacho i got caught in the rain once after missing my bus and caught a terrible cold and was in bed for two days
The freeze in Texas was a really interesting thing to bring up! My neighborhood lost power several times and we had no running water for 6 days. One of my friends lives in an older house, and they barely even had insulation in their walls. I remember one story in particular of an old man who died alone in his house, in his bed, buried in blankets. It just seems like such an awful way to go.
The mentality of everyman for himself does not work for our personal and collective survival.
Libertarians will ignore this truth.
when i was a kid, i was obsessed with the titanic (and i admittedly still am), and one of the most terrifying aspects of its sinking to me was the absolute hopelessness of the people in the water. it was so agonizingly cold, and every single person who froze to death that night knew that they would succumb to it. they listened as the screams around them grew fewer and far between. their last moments were spent surrounded by others but at the same time so isolated, with nothing that could save them from a slow, excruciating death.
“The cold will find the weakness in infrastructure”
Very accurate.
Yes. People building out vans and RV's and trucks for truck camping face this problem. Any slight weakness in insulation will create what they call a "thermal bridge" to the outside cold(or heat). All it takes is a small constantly leaking space to let the heat out in winter or the heat in in summer. And it is very hard not to have at least some space creating a thermal bridge to the outside.
@@dingfeldersmurfalot4560 Up north we call that "a draft" and it absolutely will freeze the pipes.
the hydraulic oil on my log truck turning to molasses, and exploding the hydraulic filters off there mounts can confirm this
I live in Texas and we had an intense freeze which the area had to cut off power and water for a bit and that wasn't fun. Our area simply isn't built for that kind of cold
That's why we build these thick walled hollow brick houses in Europe that barely let any heat out, I live in a country that traditionally (not anymore) had to operate far below zero for a good part of the year. Then I spent some time in Israel and I've never felt cold like that in an apartment, they have no effective heating, no insulation. The train service broke down at 8°C at some point, which is laughable to a European.
Reading through "To Build a Fire" made me think of how much the author, and the man, focused on sanity. Above all else, our greatest weapon against the cold is staying calm and outthinking it.
Years ago my father was on a canoeing trip through water that was nearly freezing, and at one point or another his boat partner managed to fall in. Instantly he panicked and screamed for my father to help him, while my dad calmly looked at him and said "stand up." His friend continued to panic until my father finally grabbed the collar of his shirt and said "Stand. Up." His friend finally calmed and realized he was in only about two feet of water, and yet the cold had taken away any sense of rationality, and the only thing truly endangering him was his panic.
sure buddy
@@Cloudix. wut, what the heck is your issue lmao
its absolutely crazy how that happens, idk what the other dude is saying because it totally happens, while kayaking with another experienced guy he got sideways and flipped, it was freezing and since it was super shallow he wasnt using a skirt so slipped out, immediately thought he was downing. it wasnt as drastic as me pulling him up by his collar but i had to shout at him that it wasnt deep, just plant your legs and ill get your shit, youre not dying today
Replace 2 feet, with 4-5 feet, would make that story more relatable.
@@Cloudix. Stay salty.
Exposure, the war poem is the one that stuck with me.
I am autistic, and in my case this comes with a drastically decreased sensitivity to several sensations, particularly pain, hunger and cold, and as a result of this I have experienced hypothermia and frostbite more than most people have had to nowadays- simply due to the fact that I do not notice when things are bad enough that countermeasures must be taken.
As a child I did so much dumb shit because I didn't realise it was dangerous; I would go swimming in the Atlantic ocean fully clothed with no towel nor change of clothing nor even a jumper, and some of my fondest memories are from those times splashing around when it was too cold for anyone else to risk it, the solitude of swimming and exploring alone appealed greatly to me, likely also due in part to that same mental difference.
The number of times I was declared potentially lost at sea, searched out by the authorities in a desperate attempt to save me from my own stupidity is absurd, though through no fault of my poor parents who tried their absolute level best to keep me from running off (I was a leash child, unsurprisingly). The paramedics knew me by name, and had my parents contacts readily available, and the local police weren't fond of me to put it lightly.
The most prominent thing I associate with the cold is that dangerously blissful point in which the discomfort seeps away and it become so easy to slip into the soft, liquid heat you now believe is your reality. It feels like a warm bath after a chilly day, like a hot water bottle on a winter's night only all-encompassing, and it's even easier to succumb to once your hesd stops working. You feel dizzy, and warm, and the closest comparison for me is being pleasantly drunk surrounded by good company. It's deceptive, and you don't realise the danger until you're falling over, passing in and out of consciousness and incapable of basic problem solving. You can no longer accurately answer 2+2, you can't remember what a noun is. It's insidious, and until you realise how far you've slipped you don't even feel afraid. Once you do, it is _terrifying._
Write a book.
I didn't even know that you could get a decreased sensitivity to certain things. Thought it was just an increased sensitivity
Im the opposite extremely sensitive
@@astick5249 I have those too unfortunately, it's like sensory russian roulette. I don't know why but women's clothing in particular seems to get more uncomfortable the more formal it is, and they use the most horrible scratchy materials imaginable. I wish I could wear men's suits, but unfortunately I'm not built the right way for that so I have to resort to tailoring them myself or making my own things to avoid the horrible bad feel. Also sound. I'm deaf, and yet still manage to be offended by noise, tell me how that's reasonable lmao.
@@asantaimeep Me too, pretty much impervious to cold. I live in Australia so snow temperatures arent something we experience much. I remember taking my daughter sledding and I was wearing snow pants and a singlet. But I'm beyond useless in heat or humidity (yes, I may live in the wrong country) .Loud or too much sound (esp. that high pitched baby shriek) are physically painful. And those clothes cactuses! If I cant wear shorts and a t-shirt to it, I aint going!
I've only watched two-ish minutes of this video so far but the "scariest short story without it being in the horror genre" is so real. I read this one story at fifteen, maybe sixteen, called "to kill a child" and it has not left me since.
I just read that story because of you, and it was very impactful, thank you!
I just went to go read it. I think I will drive very carefully now for the rest of my life.
If anyone else has any short stories or poems please share. I need them to feel again
@@The_King_Basi"the one's who walk away from Omelas"
i wont spoil it, but so far Ive only met one person that has read it and not felt at least a little bit like a bad person after.
@@alekz8580Wait a minute. Is this not the book that actually inspired THE Snowpiercer?
As someone who grew up in Alaska, the line "the cold does not forgive mistakes" is so exceptionally true. The cold is something you have to respect.
Housing is a human right.
I'm not in your spot but I moved to Minnesota from Mississippi and so many people, very seriously, instructed me to keep an emergency kit in my car with those snap warmers and blankets and extra cold weather gear in case I had an accident or got stranded during the winter and not to take it out of my car until it had warmed up and stayed warm. Never even had that kind of thing on my radar in Mississippi. Maybe a first aid kit for long trips or trips into the sticks but now I keep a bulky keep warm kit in my car all winter long just in case. Being cold *hurts* and I always kind of knew that but holy moly I didn't *know* it until I had to shovel snow so I could leave my house in -20 weather with high winds.
@@spaceylacey83 oh definitely, always had a blanket and emergency supplies in my car in case I got stranded. Something else I noticed is that people WILL stop and help you if they see you stranded on the road, because they also know what the cold can do. I helped more people out of the ditch while living in Alaska than I probably will for the rest of my life.
Absolutely this. One of the things northerners don't understand about how southerners handle cold, is the core elements of surviving the cold that are already put in place in northern areas, especially in Alaska. I lived in Fairbanks, and know I can reliably walk into any clothing store and pick up warm clothes there. Here in Arkansas, where I live now, it's like gloves are thin windbreaker material stuffed with offbrand cottonballs. They absorb and retain water, they don't cut the wind. They just keep your fingers from going numb long enough for you to grab chem handwarmers. Boots? Good luck. Houses also aren't properly insulated, so they shed heat about as fast as an outhouse without a rabbit pelt seat.
"The cold does not forgive mistakes" is so poignantly true.
Interesting
Housing is a human right
Hyped for Fear of Heat, in which prestigious essayist Jacob Geller recounts how he got a slight burn on his finger from a hot pan once, naturally leading to an hour-long existential exploration of humanity's relationship with heat, featuring 9 different literary sources that vividly describe the feeling of flesh crisping or melting off.
Oh, and Global Warming. It always comes back to Global Warming.
Hyped for Fear of Wet, where it’s just a prolonged horror story about Jacob’s trip to Florida
Hyped for Fear of Air, a 40 minute long deep dive into the dangers of air pressure entirely delivered into a mic through a fan to get that authentic warble.
@@sentientblender Fear of air can also touch on the use of VOCs in our homes, pollution, and airborne pathogens.
Oh, and global warming for CO2 I guess.
Hyped for fear of Dry, where Jacob Geller talks about how he only drinks soda and lives life dehydrated to the point that his urine is orange at all times and he gets regular kidney stones.
It doesn't lead into anything existential, we just learn that Jacob Geller needs a better diet
I'm more for that fear of sound. There's a lot in these waves.
I can vividly remember the day in 03 when my 3rd grade teacher told us we were going to read the short story “to build a fire” and a few of us including me took turns reading some paragraphs and I vividly remember how after we finished the story, I was absolutely infatuated and obsessed with this story. It never scared me, I just absolutely loved it the second I’ve heard it. The story about a man trekking through the Yukon Territory with his dog through the day and night and as my little 3rd grade mine read it, I could just picture the beautiful Yukon/ Alaskan wilderness with snow covering the ground and trees and the lakes he comes across and the mountains. It was man vs wild and to this day, still my all time absolute favorite story. Jack London has made banger after banger.
Why did he even go on that trip?
To Build a Fire, as an Absolute terrifying, Awsome Story. No one could write like Jack London. Read his book " Love of Life".
I'm glad you mentioned how cold doesn't really have to be that cold in a place that's typically warm. My brother hiked the PCT and he said that the coldest he ever felt was in the Mojave desert. The temperature went from around 100 during the day down to about 40 something at night. I don't think the human body is well equipped to make adjustments to ambient temperatures like that.
You're exactly right. I live up north, and when the temp is regularly around -20° F, anything above 0° feels warm, basically sweatshirt weather. But in the the summer, when the temp is around 100° everyday, even just 40° or 50° feels extremely cold. It takes a few months of outdoor labor for your body to fully adapt.
This is my experience too. The most uncomfortable night of my life was in August near Bend, Oregon. I didn't have a sleeping bag, like an idiot thinking about how hot it was during the day. I am unsure what the temperatures dropped to that night, but it must have been 95 degrees in the day and mid 40's at night and I couldn't sleep a single minute of it. I was in a hammock absolutely miserable. I tried counting down the hours until sunrise, I couldn't take it, so I just got up and started to run. I ran 6 ish miles until the sun came out and it started warming up. I will never forget that night!
I’m an astrophysicist that works with instruments cooled to around one kelvin, and it absolutely blew my mind when you mentioned that being unique in the context of the universe. You’re completely right, but those temperatures have become so mundane to me that I forget how wild they are. At work, heat is just an annoyance that interferes with measurements - we call it thermal noise.
Interesting!
I’m studying physics in undergrad right now. A few of the faculty in our department are working with similar instruments and when I heard that for the first time I felt a chill to my core. It’s a hard concept to grasp. I hope to one day pursue astrophysics and maybe then I’ll get use to the idea lol. But for now I can’t grasp the concept of something being around one Kelvin.
Damn. Thanks for that comment. It’s an awesome side-dish for this video, pointing out the startlingly individual nature of our experience as filtered by our individual psychology and deeply-held, implicit beliefs.
Right now it’s about 20°F below freezing here. Not that cold in absolute terms but I think I am going to join the wife and kid downstairs and soak up some thermal noise in front of the fire.
Cheers!
I genuinely didn't even know we could get things that cold. That's absolutely sick.
Same thing with the james webb telescope, which they have to cool to avoid infrared noise.
I remember reading "To Build a Fire" in highschool english. I'm surprised you didn't mention that the dog was also characterized in the book as being more aware then the man was as to what was happening and how to survive, even being aware of the man's plan to kill it, sensing his violent intent. The dog survives in the end where as his arrogant owner, lacking any primal survival instinct, perishes.
thanks for the spoiler, and I mean that honestly. I wanted to read this but can't handle reading about a dog freezing to death.
@@cyanidesista that’s the point and the story. it’s litterely a book about freezing to death.
@@cyanidesista "The dog was sorry to leave and looked toward the fire. This man did not know cold. Possibly none of his ancestors had known cold, real cold. But the dog knew and all of its family knew. And it knew that it was not good to walk outside in such fearful cold. It was the time to lie in a hole in the snow and to wait for this awful cold to stop. There was no real bond between the dog and the man. The one was the slave of the other. The dog made no effort to indicate its fears to the man. It was not concerned with the well-being of the man. It was for its own sake that it looked toward the fire. But the man whistled, and spoke to it with the sound of the whip in his voice. So the dog started walking close to the man’s heels and followed him along the trail."
The emphasis on the man's hubris compared with the dog's instinct for danger is repeatedly emphasised throughout the story. Based on your comment I think you'd like that.
Why did this guy be in the cold so far from anyone in the first place?
@@PrestoJacobson Because he was arrogant. That's really the central theme of the story; his arrogance befell him. He thought a real man would be able to survive simply by keeping his head straight, he thought he didn't need a companion because he thought being cold was just a passing discomfort. He'd never experienced true cold, and that's what killed him.
I still remember the scariest moment of my entire life, and it too involved the cold. I was a boy scout, and we were on a winter camping trip. A few people in our troop were playing cards at a folding table small distance away from the fire, and I was one of them. It was the first time I had ever been properly out camping in below-freezing temperatures, and I was woefully under-prepared despite the lectures about winter camping that seemed to happen within the troop every single year. I had on two pairs of socks, a thick winter coat, a nice and warm hat, but sitting away from the fire I knew I was getting cold. I felt myself getting cold, and I just ignored it, thinking that I was over-reacting having only ever camped in the summer. Eventually, it came time for us to get some sleep, so I went into my tent and tucked into my sleeping bag, and I took off my coat. I slept for not more than a few hours before I woke up needing to get something to drink. I reached out of my sleeping bag to my water bottle, but it was empty. I remembered that we had brought along a few large jugs of water and we had kept them near the fire to prevent them from freezing, so I put on my boots and gloves and ventured out of my tent hoping to refill my water bottle but neglecting to put on a coat. I put my empty water bottle under the spout, but I had to take off one of my gloves to hit the button. I was instantly hit with the bone-chilling cold in my fingers, but I hit the button to let the water out and there was nothing. I opened the top of the jug and looked inside and it was frozen solid. I didn't want to disturb anyone else so I tried to venture back to my tent and get some more sleep, but I tripped over a stick that was buried in the snow. I fell face-first into the snow and I just laid there, shivering and covered in snow. I don't know how long I laid there in the snow, but eventually I felt myself getting colder and more tired, but I somehow felt that if I didn't get up and keep walking back to my tent I would freeze. Still, I laid there in the snow. After what felt like ages, but couldn't have been more than about an hour, I heard someone's boots crunching through the snow and I mustered up a single "Hello?". It was my scoutmaster who had ventured out of his tent for the same reason I had. He picked me up, sat me down in a folding chair and lit a fire where we both stayed up for an hour just talking. If he wouldn't have woken up, I would've probably frozen and the situation would've been totally different.
Use ventured more in a story
Man..
Imagine finding a classmate dead frozen..
No offense but this must be one of the shittiest near death experiences I've ever heard. How do you not just get up?
@2660 I've been in a mildly similar case before and I can tell you the simple answer, you're body feels numb. For me, I live in Canada, so I tend to not really care unless it's -5C or lower to even put a jacket on. I was only wearing a somewhat thick sweater when I went to the park, and after being there for a while a blizzard hit. It's relatively common, but I was unprepared for it, and I vividly remember shaking, my cheeks, fingers, and nose being completely red. If I looked at my hands, they were shaking so much I couldn't even use my phone. Didn't help the wind was directly into my direction home. In cases like these, it's not that you CAN'T move, it's more that you can't feel you hands, feet, and face, but they're pulsing in pain none the less. I forced myself to walk, because unlike the original story I was mildly used to it (not nearly to this extent though). I couldn't open my door or even ring my doorbell. When I tried to knock it wouldn't work, my hands just shook and could barely move. The only way I got the door open was by repeatedly kicking it until my dad came and helped me. Being that cold is INCREDIBLY painful. You can breath, but it's like daggers in your nose in lungs. You can walk, but every time you do you don't know what you're stepping on but it feels like lego. You can move your arms, but your hands won't work. And if you're cold, standing there alone, or in the original stories case, lying there alone and freezing, you're body feels warm, so you stay with that warmth, because once you move again, you'll be cold.
@@luukas2660honestly it’s like waking up in the morning. You know you should get up but something about your body doesn’t react quite like your brain. Its also the fact that when you’re freezing or extremely cold, you start feeling hot or warm which often occurs with people suffering from hypothermia, which leads to some even taking off their clothes in hopes of “cooling down” when it really just worsens the cold.
As someone who suffers from cold intolerance, this video incapsulates my fear and hate for winter. I live in the midwest, where all four seasons are experienced. And let me tell you, I just about cry each year when summer ends. Seasonal depression doesn’t just happen because of lack of sun, it’s also because I know winter is going to be bitch for me
Yes. Im autistic
Raynaud’s? Because same and it fucking sucks. I got frostbite inside at work once.
same!! hypothyroism on my end 😭
I come from a place where it gets to be -40. I feel you
I have actually witnessed people die because the cold affects their mental health so bad. Especially when it goes on for weeks. We actually get a week off of school because the cold is so bad that there is an increase in deaths during the third week of February. They use the week off to help minimize death
I sympathize with you! It is part of the reason I've moved to a slightly warmer location (still gets winter but the coldest is -30 for a few days)
The song that plays while the credits roll is called The Cremation Of Sam McGee, a song/poem by a Canadian author. I read it in school years ago, but it sticks with me to this day.
A man and his friend are travelling through the Yukon, searching for gold. It becomes very quickly apparent that Sam isn’t going to make the journey, before he’s even begun to die. He’s a Southerner, and the cold bothers him more than anything, hence him saying he’d ‘rather live in Hell’. That part really stuck with me. He was doomed from the start, resigning himself to die before there was even a major threat to his life.
On his death bed he asks to be cremated, so the whole joke is he’s died in one of the coldest places on earth and just wants to be warm again.
And then. This part terrified me to my very core. To fulfill the promise, the main character *drags his frozen dead body for days* all the way to a shipwreck with a furnace so he can be cremated. He almost died on his own, just to fulfill a promise to his dead friend.
this reminds me of the saying, "if you give a man a fire, he'll be warm for a day. if you set a man on fire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life".
@@manboy4720 lol
His ghost at the end is creepy as shit too
@@davidnunez1882 lmfao
I remember hearing that story told around a camp fire. It was the middle of the summer, I had on a hoodie and sweatpants, and we sat around a warm campfire. And yet that story chilled me to the bone in both the literal and figurative sense
When a person becomes hypothermic, an interesting reaction can happen. I think its called "paradoxical undressing". From what people involved with search and rescue have told me. Many cases of people who have frozen to death have undressed themselves down to their underwear or birth suit. At a certain point in the process of hypothermia, the nerves telling you that you're freezing are actually sending the opposite message. You're unbearably hot, even burning.
The last gift, or trick the cold grants you before you're dead.
Yeah I’ve had a couple run ins with this, when I was little I wouldn’t wear gloves outside during winter, I remember so many times feelings my hands burning in the cold, luckily I’d be able to shove them under a faucet of hot water just to bring feeling back.
wasn't this also the reason why those russian ski hikers where found in the past century in a mysterious state?
It's not so much the nerves but your vessels dilating in a last attempt to save you...although, it's really a death knell. A signal you are close to your last breath
@@snakeguy8646 lol wtf, how is this even related? Its not children playing in the snow but extreme cases near death.
@@koffing2073 That's cold man.
I don't necessarily have a fear of the cold, but when I was a child, my best friend sang me a song about two children who got lost in a frozen forest and died because their parents couldn't find them. It freaked me the hell out and every winter I would just stare outside at the snow and imagine what it would be like to be lost and unable to get help. Definitely made me respect the weather a little more deep down.
Excellent piece of work. Thank you. I lived in the Yukon wilderness for many years and once experienced 70 below. Have had frostbitten toes and have had to strike the match by holding it between my teeth as my hands would not work. Almost didn't survive after falling through the ice. But I did and I still love the winter and I still hike solo in the winter even though I am 75. Cold will kill you but love will keep you. Cheers.
I remember seeing a video a long time ago about a guy who falls to his death from the side of a cliff because he was goofing off. Someone in the comments said something that has stuck with me ever since then: "If you make a mistake, your friends will forgive you, the church will forgive you, your family will forgive you. But nature never forgives."
True
That’s by Albert Einstein
Wow. Just wow. I adore this phrase.
That's why I never bought the saying "nature is beautiful" nah its garbage that's why we built civilization in the first place.
As a believer that 'Fear of Depths' is one of the best videos of its genre on RUclips, I'm beyond pleased to see a continuation focused on something potentially even scarier.
Ironic coming from someone named King of ANTARCTICA haha
Also nice to see you here dude, keep seeing your comments in Trash Taste videos!
Water. Earth. Fire. Air. the four terrors lived together in harmony until Jacob Geller published "Fear of Heat"
@@npc6817 And then its sequel, "Fear of Flying"
@@SpicyButterflyWings I eagerly await the exciting conclusion, "Fear of Fear Itself"
Glad to see I'm not the only one. "Fear of Depths" is honestly the pinnacle of RUclips video essays, the first video I saw of Jacob Geller and my favorite video ever.
In Northern Norway, in Sami Land, I was experiencing -20'C while waiting for theaurora borealis, on a January night. We managed to light a fire. I couldn't feel it so I inched closer to it, while looking up at the night sky. Suddely I realised that my external most glove started melting. I was so close to the flame that it started melting my clothes, but I couldn't feel its heat mere centimeters back.
I appreciate your ending the video with "The Cremation of Sam McGee", read that short story when I was in elementary school and I always loved it.
Gave me a sense now of just why no one should EVER venture out into the cold, frozen wilderness.
“It [the cold] doesn’t forgive mistakes.”
That’s a cool characterization of the cold as a sentient, cruel master.
haha "cool" characterization
Nature is the first and final tyrant
The cold is not sentient. It doesnt **want** to kill you. That's kind of the point. It just is. And if you can't get along, that's it for you.
shut up we know
Reminds me of the Freeman's description of Arrakis' deserts in Dune.
How is it that Jacob manages to outdo himself each time? Absolutely impressive, a treat to watch. I will be rewatching soon.
Seriously. One of the best RUclips channels in my opinion. with a decent variety of content as well.
eaven tho recept vidios have been good nothing brats artificiell lonliness
@@hjalmarhellstrom9658 I’d say Fear of Depths is the one that affected me the most. But now I need to rewatch Artificial Loneliness.
@@jeffnussbaum716 yessss I agree. Glad he’s touching on other fears
@@hjalmarhellstrom9658 With that spelling I'm going to think you might need to be rescued like Richard Bird haha
Your ability to engage your listener, as you weave together the many stories about facing the cold into a greater tale of humankinds struggle against this natural force, is a wonderful gift. Thank you for sharing.
I live in Northern Ontario and growing up freezing winters were more often than not, one time I was walking across a large frozen lake to go to my friend's grandma's. By the time I got there I remember them slowly warming me up by a hot fire before putting me in a warm bath, my feet and hands were a slight tinge of purple and all I remember were the slight needle feelings in them. That's one of many, manyyyy memories I have where I really underestimated the north cold and I now know to never mess with it.
Ahh that itchy scratchy hot feeling is painful
It's one of those moments when I wish Jacek Dukaj's novel "Lód" ("Ice") was translated into English. In a nutshell, it's a sci-fi story about a supernatural winter that freezes history and human psyche. Under the influence of the titular Ice, wars and revolutions cease and societies become dormant, unchanging. Individual people become stuck in their ways, unable to change, unable to even come up with truly new ideas. The cold preserves the world in its current state like a mammoth's corpse encased in solid ice.
A decent explanation of entropy there too.
No changes possible.
I've heard a few SCP stories that sound similar, perhaps some people took inspiration from the story your talking about.
Guess I’ll learn a new language
Sounds like the entire idea of Hallownest's slumber, from the game Hollow Knight.
That's going straight on my reading list, sounds very interesting.
A spanish youtuber once said: "it wont give you the satisfaction of saying goodbye to this world making a sound, it's not violent and it wont make you suffer in excess, it will do its thing suttle and silent, it wont hurry because it knows you have no escape, it will make you believe you have hope of escaping but it tricks you, it knows it's the end and it's not malice, it's just cold."
May I know their name? I speak Spanish and they sound pretty cool.
@@zarlacarldonnato5881 Tri line. The video is called "un viaje eterno"
I do not speak Spanish but damn that was haunting
@@satinelover4068 (Sorry for the late reply, youtube didn't notify me) OHHHH I FOLLOW HIM, I love his content and the quote sounded familiar so now I know why, I will rewatch that video now :D
Nah, it's harsh way to go, they were lying b,,,ds
During the freeze in Texas a few years ago, I was technically pretty lucky- we lost power and running water, but we had a lot of blankets, canned food and bottled water saved for a worst-case scenario. Our power even came back on for a couple hours late at night a couple times. Even so, it was freezing in the house, colder than I'd ever been while indoors before, and there was a horror in having the things made to protect us from the elements, shelter us from the world outside, fail so utterly. I swear my brain function slowed down from the cold, I couldn't even think well enough to form a sentence at times. What a terrible reminder of how vulnerable we all truly are.
I was stationed at Fort Hood during the blizzard in 2021 that crippled Texas. My wife, dogs, cats and I all huddled together in the living room of our house, all the doors closed to keep the warmth centralized as much as possible from our fireplace. During the day I chopped wood from the trees in our yard to keep the fire constantly going, and at night I would wake up about every hour to put on another log and shovel the ashes out of the way. We did this for four days. I remember feeling oddly happier, life was reduced to the most simple it’s ever been for me and my wife. The only thing which mattered was keeping warm and having shelter. Though it was a constant threat, that should the fire go out, and be unable to be restarted, we had no where to go and there was no plausible end of when the weather would break or the power be restored. Amazing how quickly you revert to the most primal needs when modern conveniences are stripped away.
“when Texas gets snow” 😂
Try New England . How does a whole state shut down from one snow storm. Just being inside stops you from freezing to death. I’m assuming you had blankets lol this comment is pretty laughable when looking at it from a place that gets snow all winter.
@@JoeRogansForehead Well thats why it was such a big thing. The house itself was not made to keep out cold. Nothing they had could help them out in what we would otherwise see as a minor inconvenience. But we only see it as such because we have the means to block ourselves from the cold, not because we are inherently tougher. Take it away and we would be in the exact same situation.
@@JoeRogansForehead
It’s honestly disgusting you think over 500 people dying from a singular storm is “laughable”.
Firstly, a snow storm isn’t the same down here. We get more ice than snow that hangs fully on our power lines and snaps them, if the power hasn’t already gone out from our horrible energy system which all of us hate and protest.
Our houses aren’t made to keep warm, so most saw temperatures similar to outside even when buried in blankets indoors.
Also, all of our water pipes aren’t buried deep enough, so all of our water freezes and pipes burst, creating more issues as homes are filled with ice and freezing water.
So many people died and yet ignorant people on the internet who have the luxury of insulation and a proper energy system decide to find it “laughable”.
One question though, would you say that to the faces of those families who lost loved ones to that storm? To those who had to watch their loved ones suffocate and freeze to death in the place they called home? Would you tell that to the homeless people who tried anything to not freeze to death on the street? Would you say that to the farmers who spent days just trying to keep our animals alive to feed cruel people like you?
@@Snapdragonangel you guys don’t have insulation in your houses? How does the ac stay in them when it’s hot out 🤔 your houses aren’t different keep making excuses,
“I’m honestly so disgusted” 😂😂
You need to get a life buddy . You obviously have insulation in your houses or your ac wouldn’t stay in them . Are you slow
The most horrifying experience I've had while camping was when I went camping in early march. I live in Sweden which is around 10 Celsius at that time. I thought my sleeping bag would survive any minus since it SHOULD work below -6. However I woke up that night with my toes completely numb. I felt so cold I thought I would die. So I started putting my shoes on, and jacket, and anything else. I didn't bring mittens or a beanie. I was left alone, as my friend slept int he other tent, with only the cold and my tools. I got to making a fire. Luckily it was simple and as soon as I got a good flame going I took off my shoes and placed my feet in the fire. It melted one of the two pairs of socks I had on. I felt nothing. Eventually I managed to get warm. It wasn't even below -5 Celsius. People don't realise how scary cold is. It's a melancholic panic, a cold one. You feel panicked but your body doesn't. It's unsettling.
Yeah, you can't trust the "survival temperature" at all, it's totally meaningless. The "comfort temperature" is better, but still doesn't really work in the cold. I have a winter sleeping bag rated for -12 comfort temperature, but it still gets uncomfortable around freezing wearing thermals. You need something extra, like a carpet over you.
Harrowing
I'm used to colder climates living in the north of england, but here its never too far below Freezing, just sometimes never far above either. however, I can recall taking a trip to florida to a place called the wonderworks, and one of the exhibits there was to plunge your hand into a pool of cold water, with a timer to see how long you could stand it.
most people there that I knew lived closer to the equator, and so lasted about 2 minutes or so, sometimes only 30 seconds. I was able to take it for just about 7 when I felt that it started to feel slightly uncomfortable, and its a bad idea to hold a body part in cold water, but taking it out I realised that the feeling in my fingers had numbed, quite noticably too.
the twist? the water was stated to be an estimation of how cold it was in the semi artic waters of 1912, meaning that this was what the survivors of the titanic who lacked access to lifeboats had to deal with, some for up to 3 HOURS.
I only mention this now, because watching this video combined with your comment reminded me of the horror I felt upon the realisation of how long it took for me to give in, with just my hand.
@@HGmolotov It's really unsettling. The feeling of your limbs slowly losing their feeling and the realisation that you may just be screwed because you got in too deep, so go speak.
That's what I felt. I tried moving my toes but nothing happened. I felt nothing but I was shivering which was a great sign that hypothermia had not set in. I had to get out of my only source of warmth for just a moment. And that moment I felt so cold. It was the same temperature as those survivors would have felt but water conducts warmth much better. What I felt was only a fraction of their suffering. That scares me.
I'm glad you're ok. When our apt power went out during the Texas freeze, by 48 hours I realized how slow my thought process was because I could stay warm.
"Summers with get hotter and winters colder" Yes, I'm glad you understand this, many seem to not understand how Hadley cells will effect this and result in even worse winters due to it being harder for heat to reach farther north/south during winter. Well done.
When the fantasy of solitude is confronted by the reality of survival.
I remember reading a good book called "Ultima Thule: The search for absolute zero."
I live and grew up in an area where temperatures routinely drop to -40c from December to February . As a cocky teen I thought I could cram in a ski tour I had planed before a forecasted weather change. Got stuck in a snow bivouac for two days, white out conditions and unimaginably cold. After two days, I stumbled back to my village , had no feeling in my arms up to the elbows and none in my feet, my face was severely frost bitten with my nose and cheeks being white as paper. Lost 6 toes, 3 fingers and a piece of nose. I also lost any cockiness towards the cold. It will kill you. Gear up, be prepared.
There’s a short story called “Father, Son, and the Holy Rabbit” about a father and son trapped in a winter blizzard without a way to get help. Their salvation comes in the form of a rabbit, which seems to return day after day that the father catches and eats with his son. It’s revealed at the end of the story that after the initial rabbit was caught, the father, unable to catch or find a second rabbit, was taking meat from his own leg and stuffing it into the dead rabbit’s pelt to eat and keep him and his son alive.
Pleasant.
I heard it's a bad idea to start eating yourself, the body already does it if you really ned it, stuff like the appendix and muscle tissue.
but for the story - to protect his son especially, that's... very rich material.
@@dan-us6nk Yup. You lose more energy to the wound then you gain from the meat.
@@dan-us6nk No one wants to have their kid suffer like that, he did a gursome thing to keep his son safe above himself. A slow and painful sacrifice.
ish!
I remember in "Into Thin Air", an account of an Everest expedition, one of the climbers was unconscious and completely unresponsive. She was presumed frozen to death and left in the cold. When they recovered her body much later, however, she was still alive.
Absolutely horrifying. My god
@@noahatlas5240 ikr
I believe that person was a dude. He barely managed to walk in the right direction (he was blind at this point and couldn't see) literally out of sheer luck, and managed to stumble on two frostbitten feet back to camp to be airlifted out.
It was a man named beck weathers! There was a woman named sandy, I believe, with them that was seen to be breathing but completely frozen, so they had to leave her
@@trinitythompson132 Holy shit that's brutal
This video was fantastic. You’ve taken something that every day people don’t generally think about and presented it in a way that is terrifying in a realistic way but also gives you a healthy appreciation for its existence. Your story telling and way of speaking is nice to listen to, you put a lot of effort in to this and it’s not unnoticed! I thoroughly enjoyed this. Thank you!
21:36 I'm really glad you mentioned just how little people down south can prepare for snow, especially storms like what happened in 2021.
I live in Louisiana, and while not as bad, the storm was still horrible to endure. We have no way to deal snow aside from guys in trucks salting the highways. We have no snow plows. It's not common to have chains for your tires. Nor do most have experience driving through a lot of snow.
We get maybe 3 inches of snow every few years or so, and it's gone by the next day. 2021 gave us way more snow than we'd experienced in years, and it stayed. The snow took weeks to fully melt, and it was really scary trying to navigate.
Jack London really writes about Cold like no other author I've read. It's incredible how much it is a character in most of his books.
Jack London was there during the Gold rush, climbing up the yukon trails. Write what you know, I guess.
Jack London is also well known for utilizing Man vs. Nature plot.
I love Jack London so much. When I was a kid I must have read White Fang like 50 times, absolutely one of my favourite books.
@@mikkicarr5717 I've never read it but I would like to.
one story that really stuck with me is the one where people went to hunt gold and then got stranded somehow and had to go without food for days and the dying protagonist wrestled with a dying wolf and drank his blood. i remember him giving up gold nuggets because they were too heavy and useless
I recently reread Dante's Inferno and the last circle of hell is quite literally just a sea of ice with the bodies frozen into it.
Back then I thought it was quite silly, but now I realise how horrifying it must be having literally no warmth in your body, yet not being able to rest because of it.
Yeah and that's betrayal something a cold hearted person would do from the seven deadly sin if not please correct me if I'm wrong I don't mind learning
meanwhile, Norse mythology has Hel, which is frozen too
@@Deathboy2442 correct, though technically "betrayal" is not one of the seven deadly sins. The seven sins are sloth, greed, lust, gluttony, wrath, pride, envy. They are all featured in dante's inferno in one way or another (lust has a circle, so does gluttony, then greed and envy kinda share one, then wrath and sloth share one, and pride doesn't exactly have a circle but a lot of people in hell are prideful) but dante also put some circles to punish things that are not part of the seven sins, like heresy, violence, fraud and, like you said, betrayal. Fittingly enough this layer of hell reserved to traitors is not only the deepest, thus furthest away from god's light and warmth, but is also the place where satan is trapped. Being the one who originally betrayed god, he is the archtraitor and is punished in this layer just like everyone else, and in fact he is the source of his own punishment as well as everyone else's, since the river (or lake or whatever cocytus is) is only frozen because he keeps trying to flap his huge wings to lift himself off and free himself from the ice, so the draft from the flapping keeps freezing the ice itself, and the more he struggles the more he's stuck along with everyone else who followed his example. Also he has three heads and while he's trying to fly out each of the heads is also munching on a snack. One is eating judas (the guy who betrayed jesus) and the other two iirc pompey and crassus (my guy dante really loved caesar)
I'd take cold anytime over heat. Heat hurts like hell, while cold numbs.
Is that the one where their heads are exposed and as they cry their tears freeze and cover their face
I rewatch this video a couple of times a year, especially on the precipice of autumn at the conclusion of summer. Chills every time.
Having worked outside in northern Alberta in -47°c (with wind chill) I can’t imagine being out there for even 24 hours without heat. I probably went 5-6 hours for the longest stretch without warming up but I knew I always had the option to jump in a truck when my nose or fingers got a little too numb. The fear of being at the complete mercy of the cold without any chance you yourself don’t make for warmth or shelter is so scary to me. I have never been close to death, at least that I was ever aware of, but opposed to an animal attack or accident when a split second decision could save you, I think the long decline and the inability to change your situation just going off hope until that slowly withers is the scariest way to die.
Everyone should also read “the things“ which tells the story of the thing from the alien’s perspective. It’s amazingly written and puts an entirely new spin on the rules of the movie
how interesting! i’ll look into this
Could you tell me a bit more?
@@404_nowheresnotfound3 it's really better to read it, but it expounds upon the Thing and how it works, what its desires are, and what its purpose is.
I really enjoyed it, much more than the book the Thing was based on.
First gotta find it
I've heard of this story before, but I hesitate to check it out. The 1982 movie version of the creature is one of my favorite monsters, and generally, knowing the monster makes it less scary. Could this be said to be true of this story too?
The mention of the girl screaming as her limbs thawed is accurate. There is a term thrown around in the ice and alpine climbing community known as “ The Screaming Barfies “ which entails exactly what the name says.
As a tip from an experienced winter camper, as low as below -40 Celsius in a tent; it is strongly beneficial to eat and or drink something warm shortly before getting into your sleeping bag. Also incredibly important, it’s better to be naked in your sleeping bag then it is to risk wearing damp clothing that you’ve sweated in, or dry clothing that you will become too hot in. You will either lose your body heat due to damp clothing, or you’ll get too hot, sweat, and freeze.
Correct.
Wearing sweat in socks in my sleeping bag is how I got frostbite in my feet lol.
I remember when we once were camping with my Scout group and it was -35°C.
We were sleeping in this army tent and the fireplace was red hot so it was probably about +35°C inside :D
I had to go for a quick piss and thought I'd have a smoke while at it, and didn't put all my winter gear on. I quickly opted not to smoke and just get the hell back inside :D
Funny, because when you do the same while going to sauna, it's different. I can come out of 90°C sauna and hangout in -20°C for a good while. But that's probably mostly the vaporizing moisture that keeps the cold away.
@@dude97x I have yet to sleep in a tent with a wood stove in it, but gosh I imagine it would be so cozy in there! Gosh having to leave the tent to go to the bathroom is the worst hahaha, even just getting out of the warmth in the morning is a rough time lol.
In my junior year of high school in Indiana, I had to walk home one day when it was raining ice and snowing heavily. It was freezing. Normally, it would take me twenty minutes to walk home but that day it took an hour and a half. When I got home, I couldn't feel my left foot. I think it must have gotten more wet than my other foot. We actually had to leave school early that day because the weather was so bad and I couldn't find a ride since everyone was trying to get a ride home and my grandparents couldn't drive in that weather.
The next day my foot hurt so bad. I could barely move at all. And now I have a spot of just no feeling in that heel and lasting nerve damage and lymphedema in that foot.
Don’t forget urinating before eating or drinking. Less liquid inside your body is less energy your body has to use to maintain its temperature.
the personal story definitely resonated with me. I was hiking in the adirondacks a month ago and while considering myself very experienced, I was not prepared for my joints to lock up and my face to feel stuck in place. Like yours, I don't even think it ever got that cold. Coupled with the wind I believed it was on the verge of death and nothing could have prepared me for that.
in my top ten video essays on youtube, full stop.
anyone else find themselves slowly getting more and more uncomfortable with the fact that their feet are slightly chilly as they watched this video?
Even after living somewhere that can get to -60F in the winter for several years, and even having a couple times where I was stuck outside in it in non-ideal protection for an extended time, I still prefer the cold to the hot.
In terms of livable temperatures, the cold is preferable. In terms of extremes, the cold, while less forgiving to life, is still preferable to me. Were I trapped in a boiling desert that were as extremely hot as the Arctic is cold, I’d have a much harder time of it.
hello Xidnaf
I'm in Northern Canada, huddled by an electric heater with a hot coffee and a blanket on my lap, watching this and trying NOT to think about what would happen if the power went out for any length of time...
Maybe, but I'm also aware that mine are cold because of iron deficiency
yeah but that's my bad circulation
I live in Alaska, and my friend (who was a state trooper) told me a story about a man who passed away in the cold.
The man planned on driving his snow mobile across a long frozen lake. Thinking it will only take a few minutes, he doesn’t wear many layers. On the trip, his snow mobile breaks down, and in a blizzard no one else would be out to save him.
By the time someone found him, he was gray and rock hard.
In the biopsy, they wanted to test the blood for any drugs or alcohol, possibly the reason for his recklessness. They ended up needing to wait several days for the body to thaw before they could even attempt an extraction.
Poor soul.
damnn 😟
Thats a big issue in the US, in my oppinion. People live in biomes that are extremely inhospitable to human life, but technology has advanced to a degree that you dont really realise the deadliness of your surroundings as long as everything created it to tackle it works. Events like this should be a frightening reminder that living in the desert or so far in the North can be quite dangerous.
@@bobdole8830 Jesus Christ!
I live in Winnipeg, a very cold city in Canada. It's not unheard of people dying in the cold. It's always very sad because we live in a first world city, no one should have to freeze to death!
In the last week a family of four from India froze to death trying to walk through the fields to the US. It was around -35c with windchill! They just came to Canada from India, I feel so bad for them. For anyone that has to freeze to death in our super cold winters!
It's been years, and I still come back for this bedtime story constantly. It's such an amazing video.
One of the things I love about RUclips is that it is possible to stumble upon videos like this. This is a wonderfully narrated video and, now that I'm subscribed, I'm looking forward to watching more of your content and contributing to your patreon
The simplicity in 0:38 "It is all of 16 pages long, it is about a man freezing to death." is more chilling than any other synopsis I've heard.
I was worried about spoilers until he said it was only 16 lol
I had a science teacher with a particularly morbid sense of humour in grade 8, and he read some excerpts of To Build a Fire when explaining how campfires should be built. Because the main character gets close enough to building one before he dies. After that, he took us to the yard behind the school (it was a decent Ontario winter) and gave us popsicle sticks, some cotton and some matches to see who could make their small fire last the longest. Mine lasted almost five minutes. I had not heard about this story since back then, and in retrospect it seems even scarier now.
PpZ😊😊❤😊😊😊💆🏽♂️🙁 plzpzpsp plpaPA❤😊😊😊
@@jessielockhart4742 so true jessie
sounds like a fun teacher
Growing up in a logging family and building great fires near daily i can confidently say that i would beat your classmates
A good way to learn not to screw or up
I watched this video several months ago, and rewatching it now is hitting me harder. I recently moved from rather far south to extremely far north. I went from somewhere where snow barely happened to where snow is apparently frequent during the winter. I've never truly experienced the cold, but in the past few weeks alone I've felt temperatures around sixteen degrees Fahrenheit. So watching this video while bundled up in blankets and three different shirts, I can truly understand the fear of the cold. I'm experiencing it myself.
A very satisfying treatise on the wonders of cold. It was a pleasure to hear 'The Cremation of Sam McGee' sung at the end. My father read it to us on cold winter nights, sometimes by the fireplace, and I have remembered it often on many expeditions as part of my enjoyment of the mountains, mostly in the Americas. Thank you.
As a Canadian I've always had a respect for the cold. Even living in a large city its insane how quiet and lonely it can make the world look and feel. It's insane what it can do to the body too
Confirmed (I'm a Swede).
Walking in the city during winter feels so weird. You know that people are around but yet it feels empty.
I do stack testing as a living, and being on a metal or concrete structure, hundreds of feet in the air, in blowing winds, even -20°C feels like this impenetrable force. On one late day, in the dark, alone, looking through a blizzard at the cold city away and below...there's nothing.
Bro I'm an Indian and even 2 months of cold are hell for me. My flat was designed for hot weather, it becomes hostile in winter
I agree (from Minnesota). Oddly I find it feels warmer in the woods than walking the streets of a big city in the dead of winter.
"To build a fire" was the first story that actually terrified me and made me realize nature is unflinching when it comes to snuffing out a life. Whether it be a wild animal or a human.
Read it at an early age, taught me to respect not just winter, but all that Mother Nature can do.
It made me hate nature really badly. And after that I think that central heating is a genius soultion too.
@@maolainmao3430 hate it all you want but nature is completely indifferent. if you try to destroy it, you will die as well.
have you watched “into the wild”
Humans are animals. Most of us are just missing-out on the wild part. ;) Cheers.
my partner and i live out in the mildest foothills of appalachian ohio, in a liittle patch of woods. one of the first significant changes we made to the lot we bought was adding a pair of heated artficial dens, one build off of each little shed/outbuilding near two opposite ends of our lot. we added them because we were tired of waking up in the winter mornings and finding stray pets and other small unfortunate animals frozen to death somewhere in our yard.i try to be inside for good by the time the sun goes down because if i'm outside at night and i hear some dog forlornly calling out in the night off in the distance, i end up not being able to sleep for most of the night thinking about whether or not that dog got let in or not.
Listen my daughter is a figure skater. I’ve had to spend hourrrrs in one freezing area only to walk out to a freezing parking lot into a cold car, I’ve thought I was gonna die 😂before
the discussion of freezing as a medical tool reminds me of an EXTREMELY cool case report from my hometown. they found this university student dead (either an overdose or hypothermia or both) on a pier, and because he was so cold and certain substances in his blood were at optimal levels, they were able to successfully revive him. in stabilizing his cardiovascular system and warming him up they replaced his total blood volume about 5 times over, but apart from some atrophy in his limbs and mild memory loss (like not remembering why/how he ended up on the pier), he walked away essentially unscathed
correction: it is believed he died of the overdose before the freezing got to him, and that specific order of events was what allowed him to be revived
I mean, if you can consider having mild brain damage “unscathed”
@@samlevesque8769 thats amazing, it wouldve been cool if he only died from the cold but its fascinating that he was saved from the overdose as well
That's incredible. A true miracle.
there was a reply i can't see anymore that i wanna respond to anyway about brain damage. so when i said mild memory loss i literally mean he only forgot how he ended up on the pier where he died. this is kind of a blessing in disguise imo (i believe the man in question has also expressed preference that he forgot this) because he had gone to there to commit suicide
I remember watching my friend play frostpunk, the amount of progress he consistently made felt like it only *barely* kept up with the progression of the weather. There's a mechanic that you didn't mention where you could set your generator to overdrive, where it generates more heat but it becomes stressed overtime while in overdrive. If it becomes too stressed, it will explode, permanently shutting off your only heat source. There would be several times where my friend would leave it on, and I would have to remind him to turn it off during the small periods of respite that he got, one time the stress level even reaching 97% before I saw it and frantically told him to turn it off. 10/10 experience, even though it was only 1 session.
Frostpunk is an awesome game - does a great job at visualizing society's needs in an eternal deep freeze.
Frostpunk is such a great game . I remember playing it during the covid lockdowns but I never managed to finish it despite the numerous trial and errors. After playing for a while I always managed to get to the last wave of coldness but it always caught me unprepared. I always lacked something, maybe I will give it a shot once again and try to finish it once and for all.
@@johnwilliam9954 You're pretty much supposed to fail at the end, but with just enough survivors after the last gusts. If you manage your last days well, you'll be sitting on a pile of bodies, "victorious". Honestly, it's an awesome reminder of the extremes us humans should never be confronted with.
@@sirzebra That was exactly my first experience with the game. Half the population died and the rest became an authoritarian dystopia, but humanity survived. The pinnacle of a bitter victory.
For me, my first true experience with extreme cold came in Milwaukee in the polar vortex of 2018. 58 degrees below zero with 30+ mph, frigid as the Arctic itself, winds. It was my second polar vortex, and I decided i needed to go outside and find out how truly freezing that was.
I bundled up as much as i could. Flannel bottoms, sweatpants, and the jeans, T-shirt, long sleeve, sweater, and winter coat. Mittens and gloves, two pairs of thermal socks and my shoes. Warm hat for my ears. All kitted up, i stepped out from the apartment complex and made me wait to the parking lot to see how long I could last.
The first thing i noticed was how instantly the wind cut through my gloves and socks. My toes and fingers started tingling within seconds. I felt my nose going numb in just a single minute. My midsection lasted for a few minutes, and only after five minutes total, I turned around and rushed back indoors. The windburn in my eyes was so strong that i couldn't open them for the next fifteen minutes.
There's cold weather that sucks, and there's cold weather that kills. That was the latter. Almost sixty homeless people died of hypothermia that night; I've never been so happy to have shelter to hide safely inside of.
I've spent a lot of time out in the cold. I lived for years in the bush in northern Canada, traveled alone on skis.
I've camped out at -50 F. in Yellowstone, on Alaskan glaciers, in the Northwest Territories, for weeks at a time.
I read this story as a kid, and it didn't mean anything to me then.
Now, it resonates with me, and it's one of several pieces I read yearly ("Shackleton's Boat Journey", Mawson's "The Home of the Blizzard" are others).
Two things I've learned:
-In deep cold there is no margin for error.
-Winter camping is an enormous, unrelenting amount of work.
You should read Douglas Mawson's book- it is an epic tale of disaster and solo survival in the high Antarctic.
I've always loved frigid settings. And I think its because of this. This unconscious KNOWING that the cold WILL kill you. It hit me when Jacob said, "The monster might kill them, but the cold *will*."
crino cumo
During winter storm Yuri in Texas my power went out, next was the generator and all that was left was the biting cold and the ghastly howling of the wind I remember my last thoughts before falling asleep “This is it, and that’s okay, I’m scared but I’m somehow at peace.” That experience has scarred me on an extremely deep level
I work as a logger. And i am used to Be in cold. Sometimes it is scary how fast nice calm Day at forest can turn to survival. Being too long still can drop temperature of body fast. You can drop in water and get Frozen fast. If you get your hands cold, doing things gets very challenging. You cant think everything Else than The pain. If you freeze enought you cant think. Being out in cold is unfogiving
@@johnevergreen8019 You’re weak af. People have survived with nothing but a blanket and a fire at night for millennia. You’re at ease with a fire because mankind evolved to subconsciously understand that you’re quite safe from wildlife as long as your fire is lit.
@@StratoArticA I’m not used to harsh winters because I live in a subtropical zone so it’s always hot and humid I had never seen that much snow and ice before I was scared that I was going to die in my sleep with my family
I think Jacob’s progression is really interesting. Starting as a video game essayist, he mastered the form and then moved onto just broader essays. But what this means is that he’s one of the few media analysts who has every genre at his fingertips - including video games. To integrate video games into a cohesive intellectual framework alongside literature, science, film and history is a remarkable achievement. Very few doing what this man is in this sphere. Really something special.
facts
I thought for sure he's a college student flexing his oral report muscles on RUclips, he's clearly developed this skill over time, I was so convinced that this is his fulltime study. Amazing breadth of work from the sounds of it.
I was here in Texas when the grid went down. I still have the pictures. My wife was stuck at the hospital that she worked at for days. Me and her dog, who hated each other, were cuddled up in the dark.
Me, watching this under my heated and weighted blanket with a heating bottle on my feet because Norway is cold.
I'm sorta curious about the flipside of this. True story, when I was 17 I got frostbite in my fingertips and didn't even realise until I walked into a heated building. It was the worst pain I've ever felt, like my fingers were full of broken glass, and I ended up passing out from it. Cold is brutal but strangely merciful? It numbs while it kills. In those conditions, survival burns. I honestly dunno, it feels like maybe there's something there worth examining? I've never really been able to fully articulate my feelings about it, but you're a lot more articulate than I am.
It reminds me of a story I heard from some firefighter somewhere about how the worst pain of burning isn’t when you’re burning, it’s when you’re out of the fire and regain feeling
oh god same, i was icing my thumb which i had sprained and i accidentally cut off the blood flow to it (combination of elevation and too tightly wrapped ice pack). i ran it under lukewarm water to warm it back up, it took forever and i screamed as the feeling came back into it :’) ultimately all of the skin on the pad of my thumb turned white and fell off, pretty sure my thumbprint was the same because my phone kept unlocking to it haha
I have felt what I can only describe as my muscles stiffening inside my body due to cold. It hurt like hell. My quads and hamstrings we're screaming. Took like two hours in a warm to car to stop being excruciating.
understanding how cold works and freezes makes the description of "fingers full of broken glass" quite apt.
@@bubblerman most 3rd degree burn patients say that recovery is the worst part of it all
The cold almost seems analogous to a black hole. It is curious and fascinating at its edge, but once you cross the point of no return there is no going back. The only options left are struggling against it in vain, or simply accepting your fate.
I like this idea. I thought of this when he described the survival game - you keep surging b eventually you know how your end will come. Like the end of the universe
Thank you for your understanding and compassion.
Signed, a Texan
The cold as an ancient, indifferent force is the scariest prospect of all, and it makes me understand why so many cultures have worshiped it as a god.
Due to coincidence, I once got hold of a "funeral card" or how to call it, basically a postcard notifying people of someone's death. It was about an elderly couple, I didn't know them. The card said something along the lines of "They went hiking in [cold place], but couldn't find their way back to us", nothing more about the cause of death. But it was clear that they had to have gotten lost and froze to death. And I couldn't stop thinking about how these last hours must have gone, I mean... probably they argued about who's fault it was they got lost and so on? I wonder for how long though, and what do you say to your partner when you realize that both of your lives will end today, because of some stupid mistake? Imagine hugging your partner, trying to keep each other warm when you realize, they're dead already... and you'll soon follow. I don't know, perhaps they were more accepting, who knows. But it's stuck with me.
Oof. It’s horrifying to imagine possible last moments like that. I have wondered what those on the Titanic felt or thought of. Just awful.
the most tragic thing I've heard about a cold related tragedy was a girl that went out partying and drunk some alcohol. Afterwards she walked home and it was cold while she wasn't properly dressed for the temperature. Sadly she was found in front of her door. It's really agonizing when you think about how close she was to savety. That got me thinking for a while when I first heard it.
It’s almost impossible to imagine such a situation. Like to truly put yourself into that position.
@@mariecarie1 There was the Estonia disaster, a cruise ship, similar to the Titanic disaster, but much more recent. There are even extensive recordings of communication from the rescue efforts, and interviews of the few who survived. The baltic sea is cold, and it happened at night. Even if you manage to stay afloat, you'd very quickly fall unconscious from hypothermia and drown. Not to mention the terror of those who died stuck inside the ship, unable to get out due to heavy list (tilt angle of the sinking vessel), unreachable stairwells, many not stong enough to climb, amidst the chaos.
@@rtertgrrtgwrtzwt honestly, this is just a testament of how fucking annoying try to unluck a door can be. not say we shouldn't have locks and stuff just an observation, and yeah the story is horrifying, but I try to use humor to process heavy subjects, so apologies if I come off insensitive because that's not my intention.
perfect timing. my heater broke today.
Welp time to build a fire
Yoooo razbuten!!
I've watched this video countless times over the past 2 years. It continues to fascinate me and there are no other videos which so well demonstrate what the cold is. Well done
I just watched the video again, and the ending of the video (Jacob's final few sentences as the beginning of the song starts up and then the whole song afterward) gave me *chills* to be funny but wow. Serious full body chills. such a great video. my favorite one ever made on here.
One of my favourite creepy images is the image of a preserved corpse of a sheep in a Scottish marsh somewhere. The water is frozen, and you can clearly see a normal sheep under the ice. But above the ice is only a spine and ribs.
I want to find this image
Oh, I typed march into Google instead of marsh. Upon correcting my typo, the image was easy to find.
@@heheheiamasupahstarchimera631 a quick search of "preserved corpse of a sheep in a Scottish marsh" will do mate
@@Carcosahead You’re a little late mate
@@Carcosahead Thanks anyway. It helps those of us who come after.
i went to school in colorado and "what i miss most is the stillness" is exactly how i feel about it after moving away. snow was a pain to deal with on the day to day, but the way it completely sucks out all the sound from the surroundings is eerie. ...good eerie. it's a sense of calm that i've only ever felt being in the snow by myself. would definitely recommend it if you ever find yourself with some time alone in a small-ish cold weather town :)
Same. I walked to the store for groceries this morning (to give you some context I live in the northern region, and my apartment is untop of a mountain, the neighborhood like a suburb but up on a big, really big hill) the store is at the base of the mountain, but it was still this morning no cars or nothing. I never really noticed the lack of birds until now, I know they fly south and all, but not even sounds of animals or nature was present, just the sound of the cold. Walking down was very quiet, like only hearing your own foot steps. It was quite misty so it added alot to the cold atmosphere. It was a good walk.
Funny living in the front range the winter has so many unique sounds. Geese visiting from Canada, shovels, and much louder cars as they kick up snow. I think a fall blizzard is the quietest. On the other hand summer attractions like reservoirs are dead silent in the winter compared to balmy summers. It's a special treat seeing the water burble through holes in the ice.
I generally hate winter. especially since where I live, we only get a few days with a tiny bit of snow and thats it. but sitting outside, hearing snowflakes hit the ground and everything being so still and quiet is so calming and soothing
Few years back on a Christmas Eve I was walking next to a transit road that goes through my town, so many cars and trucks and I heard none of them because of the snow.
I went to college in Montana after growing up in Virginia. I miss Montana so much it hurts my heart. God gave me heaven here on earth, and I'm desperate to get back.
I live in the Rocky Mountains. I did a hunters safety class when I was in middle school, and a couple of things stuck with me. One was the video we watched about true panic. The other main one was the fact that most people in my area die of hypothermia during the autumn. In the winter, people expect it. But in the autumn, it gets cold, but people forget that
dude i need to watch more of your videos. i stumbled upon this gem and was amazed on the amount of research you covered, your almost poetic way of talking about the imminent death that cold brings upon people, and so much more. congrats on a definetly job well done!
Seeing the adaptation of "To Build A Fire" was apparently so terrifying to me, that despite not seeing it in well over a decade, the second you mentioned the story I clearly pictured a few scenes from it.
I read the short story in high-school and dispite having lived in warm climates all my life it instilled a fear of the cold that lasts to this day.
Honestly I was having a decent day until he mentioned that story.
I was born and raised and still live in Sweden to this day. When I was around 12 years old my father told me a story from his youth. He had been to a party and was very drunk, but his friend was drunker. It was a cold night, pitch black and when they headed outside to leave the party and head home the snow whipped at their faces, as if it was trying to tear them off.
They walked together for a while as they lived in about the same area, but eventually their paths split.
The next day the friends parents called to my fathers house, his friend hadn't come home. He didn't show up to school the next monday either, the police searched for him but he was never found.
As spring came around, however, his body was discovered, in a ditch by the wayside.
Apparently, in his drunken stupor he had decided to lay down and take a nap, and subsequently froze to death, all evidence of the tragedy covered by more than a meter of snow, the aftermath frozen in time like a grim picture of the mistakes made.
Let's say I took the moral of the story to heart; Respect the winter or it will claim you.
Winter in the northern regions is never kind to drunkards.
There's a reason Finnish police is known to give rides to severely drunks to their home 😂
@@tonyfriendly4409 Russians: "Oh no"
nah bro your dad def killed him and dumped him in a ditch
Happened to me once. Luckiky it was around just below 0 degrees celsius and i woke up after 2 hours of sleeping. Nobody ever saw me in that ditch and I don't even remember walking there. Luckily for me it was not so cold that night. It could have easily been around -10 or less at that time of year. Still I didn't develop any fear for it but at least now I respect it by making sure there is no chance of it happening again.
I come back to this video every couple of months because it keeps haunting me with how well it reflects the terrible awe I feel towards winter and the cold. It's managed to encapsulate all the scary stories from childhood of frostbite taking your nose, or the fear of getting lost in the snow when everything turns white and you can't see or hear anything past 2m in any given direction. Winter can be so peaceful on good days but turns downright terrifying when you forget your human limits. Similarly, this video gives me the same sense of respect and dread through the great script and well-chosen imagery. Thanks for an excellent video that we can all keep coming back to and enjoy from indoors, looking out of the window into the cold.
"Make sure I freeze with some dignity, none of that huddled for warmth crap." Turanga Leela
As someone who lived his entire life in South America, the extreme cold was a very alien concept to me, But this year I moved to Germany and experienced my first real Winter. The feeling of having your fingers so numb you can’t manipulate objects gave me anxiety. This video came on the perfect time for me to appreciate.
Just you wait till summer. The recent ones over the last couple of years had been a frickin nightmare. Very humid and very hot, over 32°C. Feels like you're in an oven or in a rain forest, depending on the humidity level. Either way it's torturing. I used to love the summer, but now I despise it. Have fun with that in our wonderful Germany! 😜👍
Btw, you must have too much cash on your hands to move here, buddy. Who in their right mind would ever consider to move to a country with the most ridiculous taxes and gas/electricity/heat prices worldwide? Plus the even more ridiculous demographic situation, fukked up health care and education system with an impending mandatory "vaccine". I'd love to get the hell out of this shithole asap while there are actually people out there who move here voluntarily. That's crazy... Let's hope you won't regret it in a short while already. Good luck to you, mate!
@@sacredsecrecy9620 Here in Texas, 32°C is an average spring day. In the summer, it's regularly above 105°F (~40.6°C), and in the Gulf Coast region, we have levels of humidity approaching that of a rain forest. And our temperatures are nothing compared to Arizona, where summers are regularly over 120°F (~49°C). I'll take your summers any day of the week.
@@James_Wisniewski but imagine that, with ZERO AC. Only shops and offices have AC. Not even schools
@@Damo2690 That's gonna get a big ol' yikes from me. What's that about?
@@James_Wisniewski It's not hot enough consistently to justify it. But then when it is hot for a couple summer weeks, its hell
I memorized "The Cremation of Sam McGee" when I was in high school and performed it for my school. I can still recite it, but I didn't even remember it until the song started playing. Great include!
I kept thinking it was odd he hadn't mentioned it, but that song was great and worth the wait.
My first thought when I started watching this video was of that poem, I memorized it after seeing my father recite it offhand. It’s a strangely fascinating story.
I remember reading it in 4th grade! Hearing it was such a rush of nostalgia.
I've seen this video about five times now, at scattered hours over the past year when I wanted to experience this feeling again. I know a bit of the cold having grown up in Colorado, but there is something fantastical about how extreme and foreign the concept begins to sound when imagining the conditions explained in this video essay. It's almost as if, while the boundary between the internal and the external, between the individual and the world, becomes immense and insurmountable ... the boundaries between reality and dream, and between life and death begin to blur. I am reduced to a consciousness inside of a temperate body, and I don't fight it.
I'm someone who's lived in the more frigid parts of the US my entire life. Up here in my home state, where we're just about entirely landlocked except for the odd river, and there's not a hint of elevation to be found, we have the "privilege" of experiencing temperatures at both extremes of the scale, with occasional August highs of over 100 degrees and lows that sink far below -30 even before taking windchill into account. God, the wind and the windchill. I've talked with some friends of mine who live in regions of the world populated by the sane and NOT the descendants of people who I can only assume remained up here because their senses were scrambled by the cold of our winters, and some of them were more than a bit confused by the idea of windchill, something that I've taken for granted as just a fact of life. Because it's so unyieldingly flat up here, the wind can blow uninterrupted in any direction it pleases, roaring along most days at a pace that, in the dead of winter, feels like you're having your skin slowly carved away by a thousand tiny blades. For most of my adult life, I've wanted nothing more than to escape this place and build a new life for myself in one of those aforementioned places where sane people live.
I want to congratulate you for putting into beautiful, eloquent words the sheer dread that winter here inspires in me, the reason I'm so desperate to escape to warmth. I want to genuinely thank you for making such a cathartic video, with such chilling and gripping descriptions that could only have come from someone else who "gets it". I was in tears for most of this video's runtime because of the sheer dread and horror of the icy hellscapes you described, the ever-present threat of death, and the arrogance that so many have felt in thinking they could tame it, that they could "win". This video really has helped show me that I'm not crazy for being kind of disturbed at how much people romanticize winter, how much they ignore the vigilance it can demand of you even in matters as simple as not slipping on a patch of ice that blended perfectly with the ground below and injuring yourself. The cold is not something I "actively" fear, but it is something I try to keep at arm's length at all possible times, and words can barely describe how glad I am to be validated like this. Thank you for making this video.
So I started of like, “dude I need to read this book.”
And then I hit me when you talked about him traveling alone with a dog.
I have read this book! I did so in high school! The dog actually ends up being smarter than him.
Read it in primary school so I really didn't understand the implications of his predicament until the man tried to kill and eat the dog for warmth.
@@deadrivers2267 I don't think he was trying to eat the dog, I think he intended on cutting it open and using it to warm his hands.
I think I read it in my first Ap English class, when our summer project was an analysis of Into the Wild. We read a few other things similar to these themes.
@@deadrivers2267 I remember reading in class in middle school. It's a great, relatively easy to analyze story that is just long enough to fit into an hour long class.
I actually paused the video and went and read the story.
as a poor person in a state that snows regularly every winter, this video hit hard for me. i knew when i saw the title that it was going to. other people don't realize how terrifying the cold can be when it's just a morning inconvenience or chilly feet at night, but when you live in a house without proper insulation or heating, without resources to change that, the cold is deadly and terrifying. the most traumatic time in my life was an almost 6 month period 4 years ago ranging from the coldest part of the year to almost the hottest where we didn't have any electricity (and frequently no running water, from the freezing pipies) and barely any money to buy food and what little we could use for propane for a propane heater. the last two winters have been hell for similar but not quite as extreme reasons, and the last one i had the realization in the dead of january during that freak winter storm that, given the current global financial crisis from covid, should something happen--like our electricity going out--we would have no one to turn to for aid, and no money to find smth to warm ourselves. i spent a little while that night wondering if i, or my pets, might die because of that if it happened. if the cold wouldn't just invite itself in and take what little we had to give. our lives.
for obvious reasons, i was dreading this year's winter for months. it's been less bad than i expected, thankfully. and this video really captures that bone-deep terror and realization and sheer dread that only comes with that kind of situation. when it got to the part about climate change and the deepening of summers and winters, my stomach dropped SO hard. very good content as always. i will probably not be rewatching this video lol
I couldn't even imagine that scenario living in AZ.
I don't know what your situation is, but if you live in a big enough city, there might be shelters where you and your family can go to if it gets bad enough; if not, there are always places that give away supplies that I'm sure could help you; even asking around online in places like reddit or others for a bit of cash just to survive the week can be done. There is always someone willing to help.
@@SP8inc I think you have been fortunate and ilfar removed from reality. There are no homeless shelters in my parish (county) or in the 3 other surrounding parishes and there are no programs or resources allocated to setting-up any. We have no place to obtain free meals or anything like a soup kitchen. We have no public transportation in theses parishes and we are about an hours drive from a place that has a few shelters that are always full and they are in areas that are quite dangerous and plagued by coruptiom, criminally neglectful staff control who they see fit to stay. Their policies that bends rules and breaks policies so that the hs violently deranged drug dealers and human trafficers pay off the shelter employees and finds the vulnerable homeless people easy and vulnerable customers and be at a great vantage point to select the adults and kids who they want to force into victoms of sex trafficking
Thank you for sharing 💖
@@DigitalJill most people will never understand until they’ve been there. I’m right here with you man.
The use of the long dark theme at the beginning immediately put my brain into the atmosphere. Smart move because it works well for those whove never played and better for those who have