Good morning, Finland! The 20 hours of light is messing with me. Woke up at 3:30 and my brain kept screaming it was time to get up, look at the crack of light at the edge of the blackout curtains, UP UP UP!
The corollary to this is that in the evening, it looks like it’s about 6pm forever. You yawn, wonder why you’re tired, glance at the clock, and it’s 10pm.
I love many things about living in Minnesota, but the day length in summer messes with my head so hard. I've had to start wearing a sleep mask just to /not/ wake up two hours early.
I don't think I could handle Finland without, like, a windowless bedroom made of carefully timed auto-lights.
This is interesting because finns generally feel that summertime is easier and the darkness in winter makes everyone tired, but people who are not used to it feel the opposite. I’ve even heard that the darkness is easier to handle than midsummer.
I have never visited the Arctic circle in winter so it's hard to be sure but this seems likely. I live in Minnesota, which has short days in the winter and short nights in the summer but not to the degree that Finland or Alaska has.
I am used to late evenings and early sunrise but the fact that it literally never got properly dark was interesting to see but hard to tolerate. (We didn't experience midnight sun, but white nights.)
For me, if I woke up and saw a crack of Real Daylight, even at 3 AM, that was it, I was awake. Which meant I got like 4 hours of sleep, which took a toll.
This is part of why summer at Pole was so rough. It was also disorienting and hard to tell direction for me. Time was meaningless, so was direction of the sun.
The Long Night treated me much better. Other people it destroyed.
That makes a lot of sense- three coworkers here in Oregon have found out about reverse seasonal affective disorder and realized it applies to them - it’s like folks have brains that are polarized but which way can vary?
I did college in Los Angeles. A guy in my dorm from Seattle got steadily more depressed with the constant sunshine until the first day it rained, when he was in the best mood he'd been all year.
He transferred to UW after Freshman year.
I've spent the majority of my life near the Great Lakes (grew up in Buffalo; coming up on 18 years in Michigan), so I'm pretty comfortable with gray skies.
Here if it hits 12oC in late spring the beaches are covered with very pale, then very red, shirtless lads with cans of beer. Australian friend who visits once a year wanders about in our summer in a coat. We have a narrow temperature range and it’s just right.
I have it, and Chicagoland is the first place I've lived that satisfies it. My perfect day to go outside is 40 degrees F. and sky the color of corroded zinc. The news once reported that we hadn't seen the sun for 50 days straight and I hadn't noticed.
