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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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
@@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
"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.
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.
@@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.
@@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’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.
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!
“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.
@@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!
A lot of people say they think a painful death is the worst, but honestly since a young age i’ve personally believed a long slow and gradual death is the worst, as with those you’re forced to not only stare your own mortality in the eye but it forces you to accept your fate regardless of if you want to go or not.
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.
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.
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.
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."
This is so true! I’ve thought about this very thing a lot, tbh… 😅 I feel like this way of framing the idea can make the world seem cruel, at first glance… but I suppose if you wanted to take this metaphor even further, Mother Nature wouldn’t be a very good parent if she waived any of her rules for some of her children and not others, right? With everything in nature so interlinked, I guess she can’t exactly afford to “play favorites” and risk upending the chains of causality everything’s life and continued functioning depends on. Her consistency is its own form of “kindness”, I guess, even if none of us like the result 100% of the time? 🤔 With this framing, I suppose you could say that it’s not so much a *punishment* on Nature’s part to die from falling off a cliff due to a mistake - just a *consequence*. She must enforce for you the same rules she enforces for everyone, or it’s not fair to the “other kids”… And, as you pointed out, that means she can’t afford to MISS one either. She can’t afford to Forget. But in some ways, *that’s even scarier, isn’t it?* You can appeal a punishment you think is unjust, but you can’t argue with the natural consequences of your own actions, whether you intended them or not. That’s the tradeoff to getting to live a life where your actions matter to the universe around you - you don’t always get to decide what kinds of changes those actions set in motion. A wonderful gift, with a proportionally heavy price. (Didn’t mean to derail your insights OP, and I hope I didn’t! I just really like where you’re coming from here and had some thoughts as a result - I hope this didn’t come across as me being weird or condescending somehow. 😵💫)
My wife and I lived in San Antonio during the big freeze. Monday night was cold, but the city kept doing rolling power outtages every fifteen minutes. Tuesday night, they shortened it to once an hour. By Wednesday night, they stopped altogether. I still remember the way a city official said "if you're outside loop 1604, good luck." That was us - we lived on the outer fringes of the city. We wound up fleeing our house Wednesday night and staying with a friend who had a gas generator. I can't think of a single experience in my life where I was so cold as sitting inside a house that wasn't designed for that type of weather.
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.
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
@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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
You mentioned that cold snap a few years ago. I live in Appalachia, and it was bad. It rained as the temperature dropped and coated everything in inches of ice. I woke up that morning to a home with no power, I only had an electric furnace in my old badly insulated trailer , by morning it was only 15f inside when I got out of bed. I can tell you that was one hell of a shock after throwing the comforter off myself. Instant pain. The city waterlines had frozen overnight too so after a few hours to get my stuff together I went out to start my truck and it had actually frozen to the ground as my driveway had turned to mud from the rain then frozen solid overnight. I tried but could not get it out. That following night was rough as the temp inside dropped to below freezing but I was able to keep my cat and myself warm with a camping stove I had and every blanket I had drapped over us in what was essentially a blanket fort in the bathroom. Didn't really sleep that night as I had to keep the air moving so we didn't suffocate from the stove burning but my cat handled it very well. The next morning I was supposed to go to work but told my boss to stuff it and balled up and started the walk to my parents as they had gas heat and thier home was over insulated when dad built it cause he grew up with dirt floors and all that. I made it about 4 miles with my cat in my coat (she was a real trooper through all this), when my cousin came driving by to come check on me as Noone had heard from me. My phone had died on the first night so my parents, stuck in themselfs on the mountain, asked my cousin to check up on me. With his truck we were able to get up to my parents when my cat and I spent the next 3 weeks before power got restored to my trailer. After that experience I have a pile of propane tankes and supplental space heaters , solar power boxes and the panels to charge them, and even installed a wood stove in my now over insulated outbuilding and many other things for fighting the cold. I will never let myself get caught with my pants down like that again.
As a believer that 'Fear of Depths' is one of the best videos of its genre on UA-cam, I'm beyond pleased to see a continuation focused on something potentially even scarier.
Glad to see I'm not the only one. "Fear of Depths" is honestly the pinnacle of UA-cam video essays, the first video I saw of Jacob Geller and my favorite video ever.
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.
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
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.
I'm an Eagle Scout that grew up in Alaska and have experienced camping on multiple night trips out in -48f winters. When the temperature around you is cold enough that you can literally toss boiling water into the air and watch it freeze before it hits the ground, even the most advanced camping equipment available, experience, and training only go so far. You're constantly teetering on a thin razors edge between survival or slipping just enough to make one fatal mistake that you can't walk away from. In a weird way I guess that's part of the allure. There really is a sort of indescribable beauty to those nights.
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.
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
"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.
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.
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
One of the most interesting things I learned in recent years, and I don't know why I was never taught this when I was a kid. When someone says a jacket or a blanket or anything is "warm", it's really not. It doesn't produce any heat on its own. All it does is retain the heat which you yourself generate. If you aren't generating body heat, a jacket or a blanket is practically worthless.
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
@@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- brutus and cassius (my guy dante really loved caesar)
"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.
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.
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."
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."
@@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
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.
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.
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!
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 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 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.
If you are still intrested in the game, I recommend looking into the Sequal! 30 years later, you are now pushed into the role of leader of a metropolis and now have to handle a society molded by the new ice age all the while in search of a new fuel source as the final coal mines empty.
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*."
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
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
@@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.
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?
When I was a conscript in the Norwegian Army, our superiors would always remind us about safety first, they said they'd rather avoid someone getting frost damage than fail the objective. They also told us that the artic winter climate is the most difficult climate to fight in. Even when not in combat, you're still in a fight against the cold. Having trained in these winter conditions I totally agree, although I do not have any experience from any other climate myself
winters in temperate climates can be just as bad for the military the rain never stops, unless extreme care is taken, all your shit will become wet and once its wet, it will never dry and once the sun sets or you stop moving it gets cold very quickly with the wet clothes just sapping the heat from your body you cant cover up with Gortex or you overheat or sweat, and even then the water finds it way in somewhere and you get wet either way your forced in just below freezing temps to be wearing the bare minimum and its painful and will kill you if you stop for more than a few mins if your sleeping bag gets wet you are just fucked because its not like you can just light a fire because you are just lighting a beacon for everyone to see howd you say the artic winter compares? I'm genuinely curious
@@randomcow505 We slept outside two weeks last fall, where it was raining most of the time. We had a multifuel(tentstove) in our tent that we used for drying our clothes and equipment. During the day we just had to accept the fact that we wouldn't stay dry and didn't even bother with gortex because it doesn't keep the water out over time anyways. We knew that we would get to go back to the tent before nightfall anyways. I definately agree that wet weather is bad, getting cold because of the wet clothes and the mud. The case with being a soldier in the field is that you'll definately gonna sweat. You can't really avoid sweating when marching, running or fighting. Once you stop you'll get cold very fast if you don't put on more clothes. What we did is that we used wool netting(thin wool garment with lots of holes) as the inner layer and rarely anything else below the goretex or white camo, if we stopped we would shake the netting and the sweat would dry in the air if it wasn't too cold(-15 or worse, can freeze instead) then put on clothes, marching with bunch of wool is a death sentance. You must therefore carry a backpack around most of the time, sometimes during combat which is a pain. Soldiers can't fight without a brake forever so you must put up a tent to rest and dry clothes, etc sometime anyway. The smoke isn't really a problem during the winter cuz it's dark nearly the entire day anyway. If you got no way of drying you'll have a problem, you must then keep moving during breaks to stay warm I guess. I know special forces solve the problem by not getting wet. Wet winters ain't the best but I would still say arctic winters are worse
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
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.
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
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.
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 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.
I thought for sure he's a college student flexing his oral report muscles on UA-cam, 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.
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!
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
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
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?
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 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
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.
Saskatchewan resident here, what you guys went through might have been a normal day up here. However texans survived that with little to no insulation, very hardy folk you are
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
From someone who have experienced the cold personally, I can say that losing body heat comes in several stages. I've luckily never gotten so hypothermic that I started feeling the need to remove clothes, but I have felt the stage just before, quite a few times. I often hear people say that they've always thought of hypothermia to go from shaking and directly to the need of removing ones clothes. That isn't the case, however. There is another stage in between. A stage where you just stop shivering and shaking, but instead feel comfortable. You start to question whether there even was any cold, as all you can feel is the same temperature as the air that surrounds you. It may sound terrifying, but it's actually quite peaceful. The most terrifying aspect of hypothermia, is the first stage, where you're acutely aware of how cold you are, and you start shivering more and more. After that, you enter the stage I just described and from that point on, you start getting delirious. You stop registering anything and you simply just react to whatever you feel like. There is no fear anymore. Only peace and at one point, you'll start feeling hot. But if that ever happens to you, keep your clothes on. It's always better to sweat, than to freeze. Try to remember that, if you can't remember the reason you wish to remove your clothes. The most terrifying aspect of the stage I've experienced several times, is the part where you slowly heat up again. I specifically remember one time, where I came back to my sleeping bag, which was located in a 24 degrees Celsius (75,2 degrees Fahrenheit) warm room. Despite being in a literal sleeping bag, in a plenty warm room, it still took 1½ hours for me to get my normal heat back, most of the time spent shivering and shaking _inside_ the sleeping back, trying to get warm again. It's not the freezing that's scary about cold. It's surviving and figuring out how much of you is still alive.
@@gurb4371 People who take off their clothes while suffering from hypothermia, have reached a critically low point. The optimal body temperature, is 37.5 degrees Celcius, but hypothermic people who take off their clothes, do so when their body temperature falls below 35 degrees Celcius. They do so, because they start to feel hot, as their body desperately tries to concentrate all heat around the central organs in the torso. The problem is, of course, that taking off ones clothes only makes the body cool down even faster and it just accellerates the eventual death, rather than preventing it. As paradoxical as it sounds, people with hypothermia who starts to feel hot, should actually take on more clothes, rather than take off clothes. Paradoxical undressing and it only happens during the final stage of Hypothermia, meaning that if a hypothermic person starts to undress, they're already dead. You cannot reason with them and if you wish to save them, you must overpower them and force them under heaps of warm clothing/blankets, no matter how much they scream and kick. Cause if they lose their clothing, they're dead. The heat they feel, is though more closely related to damaged nerves, than the body concentrating heat. The cold damages the nerves to such a degree that they start to misfire and give wrong information. This final stage also causes the sufferer to become delusional and they will typically try to run away from any companions they had, making any chance of survival even lower. It's a sad, sad condition and the worst thing is that it doesn't affect everyone. Not everyone will suffer from Paradoxical Undressing when hypothermic, meaning no one knows if they would do it and by the time they find out, it's too late. They're dead.
Man this reminded me of when I was younger and I lived in Sweden around age 16, I was playing American football for a team and our training was on late, one time I was particularly tired and had been running the field in a t shirt and pads and had not taken a shower because the locker rooms were being redone. I was on my way home in a hoodie and light winter jacket that was not made for the -15c cold at 10pm with a cold sweat on my skin underneath. While I waited for a bus my first one didn't arrive and while the second was coming I felt myself nod off slightly in the cold. Almost immediately it was as if I heard myself say "no" and shot awake filled with adrenaline. I realized at this hour at this stop nobody would see me and I'd almost definitely freeze to death. I feel like I have never been more awake than that bus ride home. And since then I have never relaxed in the cold like that again.
It's scary isn't it? Because you only realised afterwards. And you look back and think, god, if my body had gone with sleep and not shoot awake, I'd now be gone. And I wasn't choosing, I was going and got lucky. It makes you wary about letting your life come down to a mere dice-throw of fortune. It drives home the reality that you don't need to be actively in a hazardous situation, making wrong choices, to find yourself in mortal danger. It can creep up on you as you sit comfortably. We dislike that. It alarms us, and we remember, vividly, how easily it came upon us!
Listening to this while freezing in the NC mountains while homeless is amazing. Before anyone asks, houses cost more than a hand me down phone I’ve had for years before I was homeless.
Hey man. I’m here in the NC mountains too. But not homeless, although I have been 3 times before. Get somewhere warmer man. This is no place to be without a house. Fuggin hitch hike, go south. Or even better, make your way to Oregon. There are cities that take very good care of people with out homes. Anyway, hope all is well…. And just in case you need to hear it…. you can do it. You can. I believe in you
@@KingCuba i live in Greenville SC- wife and I love the NC mountains. We go to western NC often. It does get nasty cold up there. I’ve been to Mt Mitchell in summer time, it was 87/88 degrees in Asheville, Mt Mitchell was 38 with the windchill in mid July. Been there once in winter too it’s just cold lol
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 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
@@Inti72600 Not quite, he's referring to how a quiet place like the deep woods feels when there's snow falling. the snow muffles sound, so you can't hear very far. animals all hole up in their dens, and all movement in the forest just stops. it produces this strange effect where you can see the surrounding environment, but there's so little noise within your hearing range that it feels less like quiet and more like the abscence of sound entirely, as if you were using noise canceling headphones. it's very soothing as long as you're warm enough to appreciate it.
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.
Northerner here. Just to say I'm glad someone understands and made a video to tell people what it can be like. I fell in a frozen lake when I was in highschool after the ice broke under me. It felt like time slowed down, like I could feel everything and nothing all at once. My friends were able to pull me out before things got bad and got me out of my clothes that had started to freeze in the air once I was out of the water. My girlfriend didn't know this about me for a while and would always make jokes because when we leave the house I grab a backpack filled with stuff for "worst case scenario" situations. I recently had a friend move up here for southern California and taught her the basics and she was making jokes and I told her the same idea of "the cold doesn't forgive mistakes, and rarely will you have the chance to make two in a row"
I'm from the same region as your friend, soon moving up to that region to be close to family soon- I have immense respect for mother nature and that cold. Everyone thinks I'm overdoing it preparing for worst case scenarios, especially with the car, but it's comforting to know I'm not being unreasonable. All I can think of is the story of the CNET editor and his family from some years back.
If a homeless kid makes a smart bag(go bag[I'm lying go bag, totally not something they should do]) I thinking myself being kinda smart, good idea to rip an idea
Just want to say I totally appreciate your use of "Field" from the Breath of the Wild soundtrack. Perfect choice when talking about the unforgiving cold lol.
@@dogwelder9699 I've spent many hours exploring the snow-covered Tabantha Tundra while carefully hunting Lynels 😅 that melody is burned into my memory lol
@@billvenetian4568 I mean COME ON so few people noticed almost the entire OST of the biggest cold challange in game history. The instant I heard the first key stroke I was bought for the video and grinned wide
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.
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 love how you talk about art, the way you discuss the feelings elicited by art really resonated with me. I don't like movies because of their expert use of framing, or games because of their clever level design, or paintings because of the amount of effort it took the artists to paint them. I like art because of how it makes me feel. Bad movies are bad because they take me out of their world, I am not convinced of their emotion. I am an outsider, and I am bored. If I don't react, then I don't enjoy it. This way of understanding and discussing art feels much more real to me. The way you describe your most visceral reactions, instead of perscribing authorial intent in parts of art you enjoy, you show how it made you believe in its message. Thank you, I love your work.
Man, the way you said it, I feel it. I've never thought about why I liked or disliked some art, but your words make perfect sence and really encapsulate my feelings! Great comment
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.
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.
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!
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
Nah. The cold is not just conquered, it's an ally. It keeps food cold and makes engines work. You just need an energy source and then the cold makes it so heat can dissipate. The cold keeps my body working and freezes my enemies.
@@Hill-BillyBoythere has been no global warming for years. That's why they had to start calling it climate change. stop falling for all these scams, son.
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.
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 was so excited when you mentioned the long dark. I love the game for both the peace and horror and stress it brings. In the game, the cold damages you more than any other attrabute you must keep up: fatigue, hunger and thirst. The cold is the biggest early game killer. The cold ended my longest running survial streak. You don't find other living humans just ones frozen and to stand a chance at surving against all odds you must search the corpse for something to keep you alive one more day. I love the long dark so much.
"The little girl with the matchsticks" by HC Andersen is one of the most beautiful and haunting stories ever written, and is the first thing I think about when it comes to cold in literature. I would have loved to see you discuss it too. The writing is even more stunning in it's native language btw, totally no bias over here from a dane haha
i was in elementary school when i read the story in my school’s library. ending up quietly sobbing in a little corner and the story haunted me on the ride home.
Years ago when I read "To Build a Fire" I discovered another thread woven into the narrative. This man had never attempted to "bond" with the dog. They were not friends or companions. This man felt nothing towards this dog and therefore the dog felt nothing for him. A pet will cuddle with you and attempt to warm you when it is apparent you are in trouble . In the end any attempt by the "man" to "kindle" a spark, or "build a fire" between him and the dog failed. Truly great writing usually carries a plot within a plot.
That’s not how dogs work though. A dog will always feel loyalty to its owner, no matter what an awful owner that person is. Especially if this is the person that feeds and sustains it. It’s just their nature. Depicting otherwise would be bad writing.
@@bcamplite621objectively, verifiably untrue. Can that sometimes be the case with dogs? Sure. Is it always like that? No, not at all. Not all dogs are the same. To say it's bad writing is ridiculous.
@@randomfactsthatdontmatter3466 I have literally never seen a single dog that wasn't loyal to the person feeding and sheltering it, even if the person was an otherwise bad owner. That dog will almost certainly die for that person. Maybe you have seen otherwise but I haven't and I've been around, owning many and seen many others owned by other people. It's not even 99% of the time, it's 100%. I stand by my assertion that anyone depicting otherwise has never been around dogs much and is a case of poor writing. Fiction is fine but there should be some basis in reality.
Your writing and editing have continued to improve, and the leaps from fiction to nonfiction to present crisis was a masterful progression. Thank you for the work that went into this.
This is a special video. The blend of cultural references, from books, to games, to movies, to real-life stories shows how the cold has shaped a common human experience. An experience that is not dependent of your economic condition or geographical position, for every human has both neglected and been bitten by the cold.
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.
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.
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.
@@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.
"[the cold] was present before anything existed. It will remain after everything is done." Elevating the cold from an earthly force to a cosmic one radically altered my perspective. It pierced a mental guard, a common defense mechanism uttered as a mantra against the worst of situations. Cold isn't a hardship for which "this too shall pass" applies. Cold is what remains after everything else passes. First time I've gotten chills that felt... chilly.
@@subtleusername5475 Depth is not something that is objectively the same for everyone. Some people may find the most basic philosophy deep, but that’s just a sign that they have a lot more left to discover. So, could you maybe take it a bit easier on the 14 y/o’s?
@@Mikeinator_ maybe, or they’re kinda closer to autumn, which in some places is short enough to be close to winter, but not sure, unless they actually explain their location lol Or they’re just lying lmao
I originally read To Build a Fire in English class my freshman year of high school. I didn't remember the title until seeing this video today, but I've occasionally found myself thinking about the story ever since I read it. I think about it every time I go somewhere cold.
I’ve read the story soo many times as a kid but found absolutely no use for it, I’ve found after this video the cold and his struggle makes a good analogy for isolation from people and social problems, great work of art that is, honestly can fit for any struggle.
I remember also reading it, but I also remember my teacher saying it was more about instinct vs logic (or something similar), how the dog instinctually knew what to do, knew going outside rn was not good, but wasn't as bothered bc he was designed for this. But I kinda feel it was more about the fear of cold bc, it the man simply more had bad luck than being idiotic
This is the same experience I've had. Read it in high school, couldn't remember the title, couldn't even remember it was written by Jack London, but remembered the story so well. The part where the snow falls into the fire and smothers it was horribly shocking.
When I heard him describe the story, my jaw practically dropped- I’m glad to hear I’m not the only one who remembers reading this in class, but not being able to find it again. A nice surprise pilgrimage
This was a great accidental find. The irony is dying of hypothermia is probably one of the easiest ways to die. I obviously didn't die but I've passed beyond the shivering into the last part where it's so peaceful and euphoric that there's no fear or pain. That's what ya get from going into a river on a zero degree day in a remote place by yourself.
i grew up loving the hard winters of michigan, knocking snow off my boots, learning how to layer properly, and feeling that rubbery texture your skin gets when the cold starts to get to it. later, in my sophomore year of college, i became homeless. i was outside nearly all the time, except for a few minutes now and then when i could convince a food service worker to let me warm up. i ate frozen food out of dumpsters, knowing that as long as it was in some sort of wrapper, it was probably safe to eat, and palatable if i scraped off the unwholesome frozen sludge that sometimes coated those meals. i slept in fits and starts in the day, when it was warmer, and spent my nights pacing in a parking garage elevator, or dancing to music from an old mp3 player, trying to keep my blood moving. when winter came to an end, i was expected to feel relieved that i didn`t have to worry about freezing, but summer only made everything harder. the heat and humidity meant that i couldn`t just wear all of my possessions, and i had to worry about storage. i was always sweating and sunburned and thirsty, and found water much harder to source than food, even as the quality of my diet dropped off precipitously; i was still eating out of trash cans, but the wet heat would rot their contents before i could get to them. the cold is a thing that hungers, but i feel loved by it - if it wants, then it wants to consume and suffuse, even if it cannot understand how that consumption and suffusion are destructive. the heat, however, fucking hates you.
I grew up with the same anxieties regarding heat. I was homeless with my family for some time, and spent two summers practically living in a Library (bless those sweet library ladies!), To escape the hottest part of the day, and drink as much water from the water fountains as possible But after that, and after closing time. It was up to our mom to get us around to having shelter for the night and having adequate food. Even now, when I'm not homeless, and in a reasonably well off condition in comparison. I still experience anxieties connected to summer The thirst, the sunburn, the simple heat exhaustion that triggered migraines that crippled me for days... I wouldn't wish that, even on my worst enemy.
When you were talking about Byrd, and how his close encounter with death showed itself through “lack of motivation” “inability to get up” I thought you were talking about depression and how his loneliness was making him go insane to the point where he was going to take his own life, making it a very poetic death. But then you said it was carbon monoxide poisoning, and I was like “oh nevermind.”
Carbon monoxide poisoning is very bad. It can mimic a number of mental and physical illnesses, including depression and psychosis. It can make you too confused to figure out what's wrong. Check your carbon monoxide detector. Even if you think it's probably still good, check it today.
One day a few months ago, I was screwing around on google earth and went to Antarctica. I just picked a random point and zoomed in, and what did I find? A cabin, which had some really old stuff in it probably from the thirty's, with the ability to "walk" through it in google maps. I thought it was weird but now I realize that it was probably Byrd's cabin, which is crazy considering that this was a random video I found that explained the random cabin I found and in a very random and remote place. Like, do you know how big the world is? That cabin is so tiny compared to the world and I just so happened to find the cabin and a video explaining it by pure coincidence. I tried to show my brother a day or two after I found it but couldn't find it.
I want to thank you for introducing me to "To Build A Fire". I paused the video and read it as soon as you described what was about. And it really is, as you say, magnetic. The dramatic irony between the oblivious man and the narrator describing him as lacking imagination, constantly describing how suprised the man is at the cold, is unbearable. All while reading it you think: "DO SOMETHING, YOU IDIOT". This is one of my worst fears concerning exposure, getting lost, et cetera: not realizing that you are in terrible danger until it is too late. You hear so many stories of people making the wrong decisions in the perfect certainty that they are fine, only to die hours or even days later of those mistakes - made when they did not realize they were in any danger at all. It makes me think: what lethal mistakes could I be making at any given time? Even right now, maybe?
I took a hike in the mountains over Bergen one winter, when I was traveling through Norway. The whether was good, and I had felt fine - I'd just spent a few weeks in Longyearbyen, so it really didn't seem cold in comparison. The walk up the mountain barely had any snow on the ground. Once I passed the ridge, snow slowly but surely got deeper and deeper, and the wind started howling. I sunk in deep snow a couple of times, but decided to carry on - even though my gloves got slightly wet. I was fine. It started snowing, heavier and heavier, and I got to a point where the trail seemed impossible. After a few minutes, I decided to head back. I still felt fine - visibility was low, so I was falling more, but I felt fine. It was only half an hour later that I realized I was cold, alone, and completely lost. I told myself I needed to take this seriously. It felt silly - after all, I was no more than an hour or two away from the other side of the ridge - from people, and shelter, and better whether. But I told myself I needed to take this seriously, so I climbed up a to a spot that I could recognize even with the relatively low visibility, and started making short walks back and forth in different directions. Within 20 minutes, I found the trail back, and though my fingers lost all mobility and took a few days to fully recover, I easily made it back and took a long, warm bath. This video, and this comment, make me think perhaps I wasn't silly in "taking this seriously". Perhaps the utter foolishness was going up the mountain, alone, falling with most of my body into the snow while the wind was howling - and being certain I was fine, and should keep on with the hike.
And at the same time, if we were always vigilant and wary about every single thing that could be a danger to us, we'd never be at peace. I guess we have to sacrifice some level of safety and allow for some risks in order to live psychologically-functional lives. And then there are people like me who have anxiety and don't do that and do fear every possible minor threat.
ah, he also wrote White Fang, the open chapter is about a group of men in the snow, fighting the cold and large packs of wolves. It encapsulated my fascination as a child.
I've always hated the cold on an existential dread level. I often get viscerally uncomfortable even having to go to ice maps in video games (looking at you Breath of the Wild) so that music starting around 14 mins was incredibly appropriate
In the podcast Friends at the Table, they play "the Long Winter" and its some of the most stressful and terrifying actual play I've listened too. To choose to gather fuel, medicine, or other resources and for it to be taken away erratically and readily by the mechanics is so punishing. It makes for great 'darkest hour' story telling but... man what a story to listen too.
@@doctorbone3655 ah, the game’s full title is ‘Do Not Let Us Die in the Dark Night of this Cold Winter’, or ‘Cold Winter’ for short. It is played in the first 5 episodes, iirc, of Spring in Hieron, which is the third and final season of the seasons set there (in Hieron). The episodes are not named for the games played.
Having lived my entire life in Alaska and the cold, I never really thought about how close death really was. All it takes is the power going out, and some unpreparedness, bing bang boom you have yourself a disaster.
If you're talking about a 'real' blackout -- say, going on for several weeks or more at a time -- temperature is the least of your worries when it comes to surviving...
As someone with poor circulation, with some of the worst pain I've felt being indoors waiting for my fully numb fingers to thaw, this video hit me harder than I was expecting it to. I love the tone of all of your videos, I get completely mesmerized, keep it up!
@@Puppy_Puppington mm I have Raynaud's syndrome, not super severely, but it means my fingers and toes go numb easier than normal. The line about the blood retreating from the cold was really accurate to how it feels sometimes
Back when I was in middle school, my city went through a rather harsh winter, now, I live in a Mexican state adjacent to Texas, so while our winters are cold because we are a desert, they are not Canadian or midwestern cold. That winter was the coldest I can remember, and the city was not prepared for it. Pipes burst, the electricity went out in parts of the city and a small panic took the city. It was honestly kind of scary, my sister was 1 or 2 years old at the time, and we had her in a room with a bunch of clothes and blankets just to keep her warm, but I remember how I was kinda worried that if the temperature stayed like that, we might run into problems, luckily, it only lasted a couple of days, and we went back to normal, but no one who experiences it will ever forget, how dangerous The Cold can be
I live next to Mexico in California. People assume that the American southwest and and the northern Mexican states has a mild winter but there is very little humidity in any of these areas. When I was growing up, border patrol used to find people freezing to death in the desert, or even dead. What nobody in the Southwest thinks of Is humidity. .I advise people in American southwest, Baja, or Sonora to buy a humidifiers. Remember to boil water before using in a "cool mist" type, to kill bacteria.
@DannyDevitoIs77 literally the coldest parts of siberia get to like -50 degrees and siberia is basically the coldest place on earth still regularly inhabited by humans so that's terrifying
A few years ago we had a bad winter in new york, like 4-5 feet of snow. Lost power for 3 days. My last text was from boss who wanted me to come to work, and then then 3 days later she fires me for not being reliable. I went to work as a snow storm was starting once and left when it was really getting bad out because I was an idiot that wanted to finish a shift instead of go home early. I'm never doing it again. Not worth it.
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.
"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.”
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.
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
"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.
@@Egonsraadpeople still learn Ancient Greek and Latin in high school.
@@Egonsraadand they werent called « thajizzgod »
@@EgonsraadI don't even know what the intention of this comment is
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’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.
“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!
A lot of people say they think a painful death is the worst, but honestly since a young age i’ve personally believed a long slow and gradual death is the worst, as with those you’re forced to not only stare your own mortality in the eye but it forces you to accept your fate regardless of if you want to go or not.
So… all natural deaths?
True, although speaking if hypothermia, after the initial stage you neither feel it nor recognize it ... that's why it is so dangerous.
@@Jane_Friday
That's why Hypothermia is so scary, when you are actually dying from it, it feels so gentle.
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
“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.
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.
This is so true! I’ve thought about this very thing a lot, tbh… 😅
I feel like this way of framing the idea can make the world seem cruel, at first glance… but I suppose if you wanted to take this metaphor even further, Mother Nature wouldn’t be a very good parent if she waived any of her rules for some of her children and not others, right? With everything in nature so interlinked, I guess she can’t exactly afford to “play favorites” and risk upending the chains of causality everything’s life and continued functioning depends on. Her consistency is its own form of “kindness”, I guess, even if none of us like the result 100% of the time? 🤔
With this framing, I suppose you could say that it’s not so much a *punishment* on Nature’s part to die from falling off a cliff due to a mistake - just a *consequence*. She must enforce for you the same rules she enforces for everyone, or it’s not fair to the “other kids”… And, as you pointed out, that means she can’t afford to MISS one either. She can’t afford to Forget.
But in some ways, *that’s even scarier, isn’t it?*
You can appeal a punishment you think is unjust, but you can’t argue with the natural consequences of your own actions, whether you intended them or not.
That’s the tradeoff to getting to live a life where your actions matter to the universe around you - you don’t always get to decide what kinds of changes those actions set in motion. A wonderful gift, with a proportionally heavy price.
(Didn’t mean to derail your insights OP, and I hope I didn’t! I just really like where you’re coming from here and had some thoughts as a result - I hope this didn’t come across as me being weird or condescending somehow. 😵💫)
My wife and I lived in San Antonio during the big freeze. Monday night was cold, but the city kept doing rolling power outtages every fifteen minutes. Tuesday night, they shortened it to once an hour. By Wednesday night, they stopped altogether. I still remember the way a city official said "if you're outside loop 1604, good luck." That was us - we lived on the outer fringes of the city. We wound up fleeing our house Wednesday night and staying with a friend who had a gas generator. I can't think of a single experience in my life where I was so cold as sitting inside a house that wasn't designed for that type of weather.
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
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 UA-cam 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
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
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.
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.
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
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
You mentioned that cold snap a few years ago. I live in Appalachia, and it was bad. It rained as the temperature dropped and coated everything in inches of ice. I woke up that morning to a home with no power, I only had an electric furnace in my old badly insulated trailer , by morning it was only 15f inside when I got out of bed. I can tell you that was one hell of a shock after throwing the comforter off myself. Instant pain. The city waterlines had frozen overnight too so after a few hours to get my stuff together I went out to start my truck and it had actually frozen to the ground as my driveway had turned to mud from the rain then frozen solid overnight. I tried but could not get it out. That following night was rough as the temp inside dropped to below freezing but I was able to keep my cat and myself warm with a camping stove I had and every blanket I had drapped over us in what was essentially a blanket fort in the bathroom. Didn't really sleep that night as I had to keep the air moving so we didn't suffocate from the stove burning but my cat handled it very well. The next morning I was supposed to go to work but told my boss to stuff it and balled up and started the walk to my parents as they had gas heat and thier home was over insulated when dad built it cause he grew up with dirt floors and all that. I made it about 4 miles with my cat in my coat (she was a real trooper through all this), when my cousin came driving by to come check on me as Noone had heard from me. My phone had died on the first night so my parents, stuck in themselfs on the mountain, asked my cousin to check up on me. With his truck we were able to get up to my parents when my cat and I spent the next 3 weeks before power got restored to my trailer. After that experience I have a pile of propane tankes and supplental space heaters , solar power boxes and the panels to charge them, and even installed a wood stove in my now over insulated outbuilding and many other things for fighting the cold. I will never let myself get caught with my pants down like that again.
As a believer that 'Fear of Depths' is one of the best videos of its genre on UA-cam, 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 UA-cam video essays, the first video I saw of Jacob Geller and my favorite video ever.
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.
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.
I'm an Eagle Scout that grew up in Alaska and have experienced camping on multiple night trips out in -48f winters. When the temperature around you is cold enough that you can literally toss boiling water into the air and watch it freeze before it hits the ground, even the most advanced camping equipment available, experience, and training only go so far. You're constantly teetering on a thin razors edge between survival or slipping just enough to make one fatal mistake that you can't walk away from. In a weird way I guess that's part of the allure. There really is a sort of indescribable beauty to those nights.
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.
"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.
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
One of the most interesting things I learned in recent years, and I don't know why I was never taught this when I was a kid.
When someone says a jacket or a blanket or anything is "warm", it's really not. It doesn't produce any heat on its own. All it does is retain the heat which you yourself generate. If you aren't generating body heat, a jacket or a blanket is practically worthless.
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- brutus and cassius (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
"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.
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.
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."
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
“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.
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
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.
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 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.
If you are still intrested in the game, I recommend looking into the Sequal! 30 years later, you are now pushed into the role of leader of a metropolis and now have to handle a society molded by the new ice age all the while in search of a new fuel source as the final coal mines empty.
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
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?
When I was a conscript in the Norwegian Army, our superiors would always remind us about safety first, they said they'd rather avoid someone getting frost damage than fail the objective. They also told us that the artic winter climate is the most difficult climate to fight in. Even when not in combat, you're still in a fight against the cold. Having trained in these winter conditions I totally agree, although I do not have any experience from any other climate myself
winters in temperate climates can be just as bad for the military
the rain never stops, unless extreme care is taken, all your shit will become wet and once its wet, it will never dry
and once the sun sets or you stop moving it gets cold very quickly with the wet clothes just sapping the heat from your body
you cant cover up with Gortex or you overheat or sweat, and even then the water finds it way in somewhere and you get wet either way
your forced in just below freezing temps to be wearing the bare minimum and its painful and will kill you if you stop for more than a few mins
if your sleeping bag gets wet you are just fucked because its not like you can just light a fire because you are just lighting a beacon for everyone to see
howd you say the artic winter compares? I'm genuinely curious
@@randomcow505 We slept outside two weeks last fall, where it was raining most of the time. We had a multifuel(tentstove) in our tent that we used for drying our clothes and equipment. During the day we just had to accept the fact that we wouldn't stay dry and didn't even bother with gortex because it doesn't keep the water out over time anyways. We knew that we would get to go back to the tent before nightfall anyways. I definately agree that wet weather is bad, getting cold because of the wet clothes and the mud. The case with being a soldier in the field is that you'll definately gonna sweat. You can't really avoid sweating when marching, running or fighting. Once you stop you'll get cold very fast if you don't put on more clothes. What we did is that we used wool netting(thin wool garment with lots of holes) as the inner layer and rarely anything else below the goretex or white camo, if we stopped we would shake the netting and the sweat would dry in the air if it wasn't too cold(-15 or worse, can freeze instead) then put on clothes, marching with bunch of wool is a death sentance. You must therefore carry a backpack around most of the time, sometimes during combat which is a pain. Soldiers can't fight without a brake forever so you must put up a tent to rest and dry clothes, etc sometime anyway. The smoke isn't really a problem during the winter cuz it's dark nearly the entire day anyway. If you got no way of drying you'll have a problem, you must then keep moving during breaks to stay warm I guess. I know special forces solve the problem by not getting wet. Wet winters ain't the best but I would still say arctic winters are worse
That's why Nazis couldn't take the commies lol Russian winter 😅
As someone who has done military training in both Norway and 29 palms. I'd rather be in the desert 100% of the time
@@KayKay114 Finnish white death laughing at all the frozen Soviets in Finland lmao
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
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.
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.
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 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 UA-cam, 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.
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!
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”
@@bennyandthetops 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
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?
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.
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.
Saskatchewan resident here, what you guys went through might have been a normal day up here. However texans survived that with little to no insulation, very hardy folk you are
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
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.
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'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
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
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
From someone who have experienced the cold personally, I can say that losing body heat comes in several stages. I've luckily never gotten so hypothermic that I started feeling the need to remove clothes, but I have felt the stage just before, quite a few times. I often hear people say that they've always thought of hypothermia to go from shaking and directly to the need of removing ones clothes. That isn't the case, however. There is another stage in between. A stage where you just stop shivering and shaking, but instead feel comfortable. You start to question whether there even was any cold, as all you can feel is the same temperature as the air that surrounds you. It may sound terrifying, but it's actually quite peaceful. The most terrifying aspect of hypothermia, is the first stage, where you're acutely aware of how cold you are, and you start shivering more and more. After that, you enter the stage I just described and from that point on, you start getting delirious. You stop registering anything and you simply just react to whatever you feel like. There is no fear anymore. Only peace and at one point, you'll start feeling hot. But if that ever happens to you, keep your clothes on. It's always better to sweat, than to freeze. Try to remember that, if you can't remember the reason you wish to remove your clothes.
The most terrifying aspect of the stage I've experienced several times, is the part where you slowly heat up again. I specifically remember one time, where I came back to my sleeping bag, which was located in a 24 degrees Celsius (75,2 degrees Fahrenheit) warm room. Despite being in a literal sleeping bag, in a plenty warm room, it still took 1½ hours for me to get my normal heat back, most of the time spent shivering and shaking _inside_ the sleeping back, trying to get warm again.
It's not the freezing that's scary about cold. It's surviving and figuring out how much of you is still alive.
i have felt that feeling its quite nice felling but you know whats going to happen if you stay out
Interesting why is taking the clothes off a thing? Is it cause you in a state of delirious or genuinely feel hot at one point ?
@@gurb4371 People who take off their clothes while suffering from hypothermia, have reached a critically low point. The optimal body temperature, is 37.5 degrees Celcius, but hypothermic people who take off their clothes, do so when their body temperature falls below 35 degrees Celcius. They do so, because they start to feel hot, as their body desperately tries to concentrate all heat around the central organs in the torso. The problem is, of course, that taking off ones clothes only makes the body cool down even faster and it just accellerates the eventual death, rather than preventing it. As paradoxical as it sounds, people with hypothermia who starts to feel hot, should actually take on more clothes, rather than take off clothes.
Paradoxical undressing and it only happens during the final stage of Hypothermia, meaning that if a hypothermic person starts to undress, they're already dead. You cannot reason with them and if you wish to save them, you must overpower them and force them under heaps of warm clothing/blankets, no matter how much they scream and kick. Cause if they lose their clothing, they're dead. The heat they feel, is though more closely related to damaged nerves, than the body concentrating heat. The cold damages the nerves to such a degree that they start to misfire and give wrong information. This final stage also causes the sufferer to become delusional and they will typically try to run away from any companions they had, making any chance of survival even lower.
It's a sad, sad condition and the worst thing is that it doesn't affect everyone. Not everyone will suffer from Paradoxical Undressing when hypothermic, meaning no one knows if they would do it and by the time they find out, it's too late. They're dead.
Very well written
@@Arterexius i really appreciate the response, I never knew that and it’s very interesting how that works. Thanks again, have a great day.
Man this reminded me of when I was younger and I lived in Sweden around age 16, I was playing American football for a team and our training was on late, one time I was particularly tired and had been running the field in a t shirt and pads and had not taken a shower because the locker rooms were being redone. I was on my way home in a hoodie and light winter jacket that was not made for the -15c cold at 10pm with a cold sweat on my skin underneath. While I waited for a bus my first one didn't arrive and while the second was coming I felt myself nod off slightly in the cold. Almost immediately it was as if I heard myself say "no" and shot awake filled with adrenaline. I realized at this hour at this stop nobody would see me and I'd almost definitely freeze to death.
I feel like I have never been more awake than that bus ride home. And since then I have never relaxed in the cold like that again.
wow
Holy crap
Jesus, man.
That story gives chills because what would have happened if you had fallen asleep
It's scary isn't it? Because you only realised afterwards. And you look back and think, god, if my body had gone with sleep and not shoot awake, I'd now be gone. And I wasn't choosing, I was going and got lucky. It makes you wary about letting your life come down to a mere dice-throw of fortune. It drives home the reality that you don't need to be actively in a hazardous situation, making wrong choices, to find yourself in mortal danger. It can creep up on you as you sit comfortably. We dislike that. It alarms us, and we remember, vividly, how easily it came upon us!
Listening to this while freezing in the NC mountains while homeless is amazing. Before anyone asks, houses cost more than a hand me down phone I’ve had for years before I was homeless.
Obviously I don't know you, but I hope you're doing ok right now.
Hey man. I’m here in the NC mountains too. But not homeless, although I have been 3 times before. Get somewhere warmer man. This is no place to be without a house. Fuggin hitch hike, go south. Or even better, make your way to Oregon. There are cities that take very good care of people with out homes.
Anyway, hope all is well…. And just in case you need to hear it….
you can do it. You can. I believe in you
@@KingCuba i live in Greenville SC- wife and I love the NC mountains. We go to western NC often. It does get nasty cold up there. I’ve been to Mt Mitchell in summer time, it was 87/88 degrees in Asheville, Mt Mitchell was 38 with the windchill in mid July. Been there once in winter too it’s just cold lol
Good luck to you my friend
@@jimjohanson8152 we survived the winter
It's been years, and I still come back for this bedtime story constantly. It's such an amazing video.
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.
perfect timing. my heater broke today.
Welp time to build a fire
Yoooo razbuten!!
"What I miss most is stillness" hits me like a ton of bricks. This is a beautiful essay Geller, thank you
"What I miss most is stillness" So he was shivering form the sheer cold?
@@Inti72600 Not quite, he's referring to how a quiet place like the deep woods feels when there's snow falling. the snow muffles sound, so you can't hear very far. animals all hole up in their dens, and all movement in the forest just stops. it produces this strange effect where you can see the surrounding environment, but there's so little noise within your hearing range that it feels less like quiet and more like the abscence of sound entirely, as if you were using noise canceling headphones. it's very soothing as long as you're warm enough to appreciate it.
@@emmak4916 okay I see, thanks
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.
I read this story over 30 years ago and still every time i make a fire i look up to see whats above the fire.
This story realy left a mark on me.
That’s meaningful
Northerner here. Just to say I'm glad someone understands and made a video to tell people what it can be like. I fell in a frozen lake when I was in highschool after the ice broke under me. It felt like time slowed down, like I could feel everything and nothing all at once. My friends were able to pull me out before things got bad and got me out of my clothes that had started to freeze in the air once I was out of the water. My girlfriend didn't know this about me for a while and would always make jokes because when we leave the house I grab a backpack filled with stuff for "worst case scenario" situations. I recently had a friend move up here for southern California and taught her the basics and she was making jokes and I told her the same idea of "the cold doesn't forgive mistakes, and rarely will you have the chance to make two in a row"
that's cold man you got balls
I know I'm just a stranger online, but I'm glad you survived. I can't imagine how scary that must've been
Good for you
I'm from the same region as your friend, soon moving up to that region to be close to family soon- I have immense respect for mother nature and that cold. Everyone thinks I'm overdoing it preparing for worst case scenarios, especially with the car, but it's comforting to know I'm not being unreasonable. All I can think of is the story of the CNET editor and his family from some years back.
If a homeless kid makes a smart bag(go bag[I'm lying go bag, totally not something they should do]) I thinking myself being kinda smart, good idea to rip an idea
Just want to say I totally appreciate your use of "Field" from the Breath of the Wild soundtrack. Perfect choice when talking about the unforgiving cold lol.
Thank you I was going crazy thinking of where that song was from
@@dogwelder9699 I've spent many hours exploring the snow-covered Tabantha Tundra while carefully hunting Lynels 😅 that melody is burned into my memory lol
He also used music from “the long dark”
@@rabd3721 This was the same thing that I thought. It fits perfectly.
@@billvenetian4568 I mean COME ON so few people noticed almost the entire OST of the biggest cold challange in game history. The instant I heard the first key stroke I was bought for the video and grinned wide
Thank you for the great content over the years!!
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.
I love how you talk about art, the way you discuss the feelings elicited by art really resonated with me. I don't like movies because of their expert use of framing, or games because of their clever level design, or paintings because of the amount of effort it took the artists to paint them. I like art because of how it makes me feel. Bad movies are bad because they take me out of their world, I am not convinced of their emotion. I am an outsider, and I am bored. If I don't react, then I don't enjoy it. This way of understanding and discussing art feels much more real to me. The way you describe your most visceral reactions, instead of perscribing authorial intent in parts of art you enjoy, you show how it made you believe in its message. Thank you, I love your work.
Man, the way you said it, I feel it. I've never thought about why I liked or disliked some art, but your words make perfect sence and really encapsulate my feelings! Great comment
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!
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
“There is no conquering the cold... only surviving it.“ -Jacob Geller
Laughing in global warming
Nah. The cold is not just conquered, it's an ally. It keeps food cold and makes engines work.
You just need an energy source and then the cold makes it so heat can dissipate.
The cold keeps my body working and freezes my enemies.
@@Hill-BillyBoythere has been no global warming for years. That's why they had to start calling it climate change. stop falling for all these scams, son.
@@Hill-BillyBoywhy did I laugh at this 😭
@@Hill-BillyBoy Well, such as cold, heat is something humans cannot conquer too if we think about it, sooo we got back to the starting point lol
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
"Chilling"... Well played.
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 was so excited when you mentioned the long dark. I love the game for both the peace and horror and stress it brings. In the game, the cold damages you more than any other attrabute you must keep up: fatigue, hunger and thirst. The cold is the biggest early game killer. The cold ended my longest running survial streak. You don't find other living humans just ones frozen and to stand a chance at surving against all odds you must search the corpse for something to keep you alive one more day. I love the long dark so much.
"The little girl with the matchsticks" by HC Andersen is one of the most beautiful and haunting stories ever written, and is the first thing I think about when it comes to cold in literature. I would have loved to see you discuss it too. The writing is even more stunning in it's native language btw, totally no bias over here from a dane haha
Yes! its so haunting
I was waiting for him to bring that up.
i was in elementary school when i read the story in my school’s library. ending up quietly sobbing in a little corner and the story haunted me on the ride home.
@@lukerose4166 Thank you! Nice little read
Beautiful short 🥲
Years ago when I read "To Build a Fire" I discovered another thread woven into the narrative. This man had never attempted to "bond" with the dog. They were not friends or companions. This man felt nothing towards this dog and therefore the dog felt nothing for him. A pet will cuddle with you and attempt to warm you when it is apparent you are in trouble . In the end any attempt by the "man" to "kindle" a spark, or "build a fire" between him and the dog failed. Truly great writing usually carries a plot within a plot.
Thanks for pointing that out! I’ve read the same before
That’s not how dogs work though. A dog will always feel loyalty to its owner, no matter what an awful owner that person is. Especially if this is the person that feeds and sustains it. It’s just their nature. Depicting otherwise would be bad writing.
@@bcamplite621 Its not bad writing to not depict something accurately or factual
@@bcamplite621objectively, verifiably untrue. Can that sometimes be the case with dogs? Sure. Is it always like that? No, not at all. Not all dogs are the same. To say it's bad writing is ridiculous.
@@randomfactsthatdontmatter3466 I have literally never seen a single dog that wasn't loyal to the person feeding and sheltering it, even if the person was an otherwise bad owner. That dog will almost certainly die for that person. Maybe you have seen otherwise but I haven't and I've been around, owning many and seen many others owned by other people. It's not even 99% of the time, it's 100%. I stand by my assertion that anyone depicting otherwise has never been around dogs much and is a case of poor writing. Fiction is fine but there should be some basis in reality.
Your writing and editing have continued to improve, and the leaps from fiction to nonfiction to present crisis was a masterful progression. Thank you for the work that went into this.
ua-cam.com/video/fovzTVcu9fg/v-deo.html
Finally..
This is a special video. The blend of cultural references, from books, to games, to movies, to real-life stories shows how the cold has shaped a common human experience. An experience that is not dependent of your economic condition or geographical position, for every human has both neglected and been bitten by the cold.
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.
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.
"[the cold] was present before anything existed. It will remain after everything is done."
Elevating the cold from an earthly force to a cosmic one radically altered my perspective.
It pierced a mental guard, a common defense mechanism uttered as a mantra against the worst of situations.
Cold isn't a hardship for which "this too shall pass" applies.
Cold is what remains after everything else passes.
First time I've gotten chills that felt... chilly.
it's not that deep lmao
Cold, scientifically speaking is just the absence of heat.
@@DeltaCain13 that, scientifically speaking, was an absolutely useless comment.
@@subtleusername5475 Depth is not something that is objectively the same for everyone. Some people may find the most basic philosophy deep, but that’s just a sign that they have a lot more left to discover. So, could you maybe take it a bit easier on the 14 y/o’s?
@Benjamin Rains smelly...
I spent 37 years in Alaska, I can tell you To Build a Fire is a docudrama.
closer and closer to the ever elusive hour-long geller video
also a very spooky way to really kick off the winter season, oh no!!!
kick off?
@@Moose1030 they might be in the southern hemisphere, where the seasons are the opposite of what it is in the northern hemisphere
@@cutelasscutlass876 wouldn't that mean they'd be in the middle of summer?
@@Mikeinator_ maybe, or they’re kinda closer to autumn, which in some places is short enough to be close to winter, but not sure, unless they actually explain their location lol
Or they’re just lying lmao
I originally read To Build a Fire in English class my freshman year of high school. I didn't remember the title until seeing this video today, but I've occasionally found myself thinking about the story ever since I read it. I think about it every time I go somewhere cold.
Holy shit I was coming down here to type this comment when I found it.
I’ve read the story soo many times as a kid but found absolutely no use for it, I’ve found after this video the cold and his struggle makes a good analogy for isolation from people and social problems, great work of art that is, honestly can fit for any struggle.
I remember also reading it, but I also remember my teacher saying it was more about instinct vs logic (or something similar), how the dog instinctually knew what to do, knew going outside rn was not good, but wasn't as bothered bc he was designed for this. But I kinda feel it was more about the fear of cold bc, it the man simply more had bad luck than being idiotic
This is the same experience I've had. Read it in high school, couldn't remember the title, couldn't even remember it was written by Jack London, but remembered the story so well. The part where the snow falls into the fire and smothers it was horribly shocking.
When I heard him describe the story, my jaw practically dropped- I’m glad to hear I’m not the only one who remembers reading this in class, but not being able to find it again.
A nice surprise pilgrimage
This was a great accidental find. The irony is dying of hypothermia is probably one of the easiest ways to die. I obviously didn't die but I've passed beyond the shivering into the last part where it's so peaceful and euphoric that there's no fear or pain. That's what ya get from going into a river on a zero degree day in a remote place by yourself.
Why did you do that
@@eos_aurora stupid people exist
How did you survive?
Op hasn't responded. Clearly hypothermia came for revenge
@@takeandbakejake3271 lmao
I love your essay. I dont know why i associate the fear of cold with freedom and life, but i dont think im the only one.
i grew up loving the hard winters of michigan, knocking snow off my boots, learning how to layer properly, and feeling that rubbery texture your skin gets when the cold starts to get to it.
later, in my sophomore year of college, i became homeless. i was outside nearly all the time, except for a few minutes now and then when i could convince a food service worker to let me warm up. i ate frozen food out of dumpsters, knowing that as long as it was in some sort of wrapper, it was probably safe to eat, and palatable if i scraped off the unwholesome frozen sludge that sometimes coated those meals. i slept in fits and starts in the day, when it was warmer, and spent my nights pacing in a parking garage elevator, or dancing to music from an old mp3 player, trying to keep my blood moving.
when winter came to an end, i was expected to feel relieved that i didn`t have to worry about freezing, but summer only made everything harder. the heat and humidity meant that i couldn`t just wear all of my possessions, and i had to worry about storage. i was always sweating and sunburned and thirsty, and found water much harder to source than food, even as the quality of my diet dropped off precipitously; i was still eating out of trash cans, but the wet heat would rot their contents before i could get to them.
the cold is a thing that hungers, but i feel loved by it - if it wants, then it wants to consume and suffuse, even if it cannot understand how that consumption and suffusion are destructive. the heat, however, fucking hates you.
I grew up with the same anxieties regarding heat. I was homeless with my family for some time, and spent two summers practically living in a Library (bless those sweet library ladies!), To escape the hottest part of the day, and drink as much water from the water fountains as possible
But after that, and after closing time. It was up to our mom to get us around to having shelter for the night and having adequate food.
Even now, when I'm not homeless, and in a reasonably well off condition in comparison.
I still experience anxieties connected to summer
The thirst, the sunburn, the simple heat exhaustion that triggered migraines that crippled me for days...
I wouldn't wish that, even on my worst enemy.
When you were talking about Byrd, and how his close encounter with death showed itself through “lack of motivation” “inability to get up” I thought you were talking about depression and how his loneliness was making him go insane to the point where he was going to take his own life, making it a very poetic death.
But then you said it was carbon monoxide poisoning, and I was like “oh nevermind.”
Carbon monoxide poisoning is very bad. It can mimic a number of mental and physical illnesses, including depression and psychosis. It can make you too confused to figure out what's wrong. Check your carbon monoxide detector. Even if you think it's probably still good, check it today.
We solved science guys. Depression is caused by Carbon Monoxide posioning!
@@PhantomGato-v-does that mean thom yorke wrote no surprises in a more literal way?
Bro same, I was gonna reply to Byrd's situation with "He just like me fr"
One day a few months ago, I was screwing around on google earth and went to Antarctica. I just picked a random point and zoomed in, and what did I find? A cabin, which had some really old stuff in it probably from the thirty's, with the ability to "walk" through it in google maps. I thought it was weird but now I realize that it was probably Byrd's cabin, which is crazy considering that this was a random video I found that explained the random cabin I found and in a very random and remote place. Like, do you know how big the world is? That cabin is so tiny compared to the world and I just so happened to find the cabin and a video explaining it by pure coincidence. I tried to show my brother a day or two after I found it but couldn't find it.
I want to thank you for introducing me to "To Build A Fire". I paused the video and read it as soon as you described what was about. And it really is, as you say, magnetic. The dramatic irony between the oblivious man and the narrator describing him as lacking imagination, constantly describing how suprised the man is at the cold, is unbearable. All while reading it you think: "DO SOMETHING, YOU IDIOT". This is one of my worst fears concerning exposure, getting lost, et cetera: not realizing that you are in terrible danger until it is too late. You hear so many stories of people making the wrong decisions in the perfect certainty that they are fine, only to die hours or even days later of those mistakes - made when they did not realize they were in any danger at all. It makes me think: what lethal mistakes could I be making at any given time? Even right now, maybe?
Life itself really be a cosmic horror
thats jack london for ya
I took a hike in the mountains over Bergen one winter, when I was traveling through Norway. The whether was good, and I had felt fine - I'd just spent a few weeks in Longyearbyen, so it really didn't seem cold in comparison. The walk up the mountain barely had any snow on the ground.
Once I passed the ridge, snow slowly but surely got deeper and deeper, and the wind started howling. I sunk in deep snow a couple of times, but decided to carry on - even though my gloves got slightly wet. I was fine.
It started snowing, heavier and heavier, and I got to a point where the trail seemed impossible. After a few minutes, I decided to head back. I still felt fine - visibility was low, so I was falling more, but I felt fine.
It was only half an hour later that I realized I was cold, alone, and completely lost.
I told myself I needed to take this seriously. It felt silly - after all, I was no more than an hour or two away from the other side of the ridge - from people, and shelter, and better whether. But I told myself I needed to take this seriously, so I climbed up a to a spot that I could recognize even with the relatively low visibility, and started making short walks back and forth in different directions. Within 20 minutes, I found the trail back, and though my fingers lost all mobility and took a few days to fully recover, I easily made it back and took a long, warm bath.
This video, and this comment, make me think perhaps I wasn't silly in "taking this seriously". Perhaps the utter foolishness was going up the mountain, alone, falling with most of my body into the snow while the wind was howling - and being certain I was fine, and should keep on with the hike.
And at the same time, if we were always vigilant and wary about every single thing that could be a danger to us, we'd never be at peace. I guess we have to sacrifice some level of safety and allow for some risks in order to live psychologically-functional lives. And then there are people like me who have anxiety and don't do that and do fear every possible minor threat.
I think it's a good metaphor for the climate crisis and pollution etc.
ah, he also wrote White Fang, the open chapter is about a group of men in the snow, fighting the cold and large packs of wolves. It encapsulated my fascination as a child.
I've always hated the cold on an existential dread level. I often get viscerally uncomfortable even having to go to ice maps in video games (looking at you Breath of the Wild) so that music starting around 14 mins was incredibly appropriate
It feels endlessly empty man X'D
Oh yes, I recognized that music immediately
Ice cap zone tho that shit fire eugh
BotW is also kinda unique in that an icy rivier is the most dangerous enemy in the game, does more DPS than anything else
At least in BOTW you have the option to teleport the hell out of there if need be.
In the podcast Friends at the Table, they play "the Long Winter" and its some of the most stressful and terrifying actual play I've listened too. To choose to gather fuel, medicine, or other resources and for it to be taken away erratically and readily by the mechanics is so punishing. It makes for great 'darkest hour' story telling but... man what a story to listen too.
Hi, are the episodes actually called "the long winter" or something else? I looked it up bc it sounds interesting but didn't find anything
@@doctorbone3655 ah, the game’s full title is ‘Do Not Let Us Die in the Dark Night of this Cold Winter’, or ‘Cold Winter’ for short. It is played in the first 5 episodes, iirc, of Spring in Hieron, which is the third and final season of the seasons set there (in Hieron). The episodes are not named for the games played.
Having lived my entire life in Alaska and the cold, I never really thought about how close death really was. All it takes is the power going out, and some unpreparedness, bing bang boom you have yourself a disaster.
Bing bam boom,
Hamburger time
If you're talking about a 'real' blackout -- say, going on for several weeks or more at a time -- temperature is the least of your worries when it comes to surviving...
😂 this is a hell of a thing to pop up on my newsfeed 2 days after I began seriously pondering an overland road trip from Maine to Labrador
As someone with poor circulation, with some of the worst pain I've felt being indoors waiting for my fully numb fingers to thaw, this video hit me harder than I was expecting it to. I love the tone of all of your videos, I get completely mesmerized, keep it up!
Why do you have poor circulation?
@@Puppy_Puppington mm I have Raynaud's syndrome, not super severely, but it means my fingers and toes go numb easier than normal. The line about the blood retreating from the cold was really accurate to how it feels sometimes
Can relate. I sometimes have to shout to go trough the pain.
@@SilverFlames_ that bit where he explained that hands and feet can and will lose blood had me like. Yeah. They do that. Lol
Yep I hate that feeling.
Back when I was in middle school, my city went through a rather harsh winter, now, I live in a Mexican state adjacent to Texas, so while our winters are cold because we are a desert, they are not Canadian or midwestern cold. That winter was the coldest I can remember, and the city was not prepared for it. Pipes burst, the electricity went out in parts of the city and a small panic took the city. It was honestly kind of scary, my sister was 1 or 2 years old at the time, and we had her in a room with a bunch of clothes and blankets just to keep her warm, but I remember how I was kinda worried that if the temperature stayed like that, we might run into problems, luckily, it only lasted a couple of days, and we went back to normal, but no one who experiences it will ever forget, how dangerous The Cold can be
....De las ultimas personas que esperaba ver aqui
I live next to Mexico in California. People assume that the American southwest and and the northern Mexican states has a mild winter but there is very little humidity in any of these areas. When I was growing up, border patrol used to find people freezing to death in the desert, or even dead. What nobody in the Southwest thinks of Is humidity. .I advise people in American southwest, Baja, or Sonora to buy a humidifiers. Remember to boil water before using in a "cool mist" type, to kill bacteria.
@DannyDevitoIs77 literally the coldest parts of siberia get to like -50 degrees and siberia is basically the coldest place on earth still regularly inhabited by humans so that's terrifying
A few years ago we had a bad winter in new york, like 4-5 feet of snow. Lost power for 3 days. My last text was from boss who wanted me to come to work, and then then 3 days later she fires me for not being reliable. I went to work as a snow storm was starting once and left when it was really getting bad out because I was an idiot that wanted to finish a shift instead of go home early. I'm never doing it again. Not worth it.
Que haces aqui Fred?!