I have, at various times, written about how my general mood is subject to long-term swings, apparently seasonal. I go down in the fall or winter and come back up in spring: A Mind Over the Long Haul: My Posting Patterns.
This has been going on, it seems like, my entire adult life, starting in young adulthood (my freshman year in college). At one time a friend suggested that I had seasonal affective disorder (SAD). I never really checked that out, though earlier this year I thought about getting those bright lights that are supposed to stave it off.
Anyhow, things changed this year. Look at this chart, which depicts my monthly blogging frequency since 2021:
We see the standard pattern in 2021. There’s a big drop from August to October, to a low in November. I start back up in December, but don’t come back until April.
In 2022 again, have a big drop between August and September, a low in November, but then I shoot up in December up through April and then, whoops! back down for May. What happened?
At the end of November 2022 Open AI released ChatGPT to the web. I started playing with it, a lot, and got back to blogging, a lot. I kept that going through the end of April, when I lost intellectual and creative steam. But then, late in August, things started back up (I wrote over half of the August posts in the last week of the month). My thinking has come back.
Why? Interesting question. I don’t really know. Let’s just leave it for now and move on.
If my winter slumps were due to SAD, then that shouldn’t have happened. Sure, there’s ChatGPT, so what? Why should that make a difference if my mood is controlled by biochemical events that are cued by seasonal variations in illumination? But what if my moods are not cued by the weather? What if something else is going on and, whatever that is, it just happened to more or less coincide with seasonal variations in light?
NOTE: The bar for September of this year, at the far right of the chart, is a guess. I set the number at 90 so the chart would show what I think is going on. The month isn’t over yet. It’s the 16th. When this post goes up I’ll have 50 for the month. I’m over half way to 90 and I still have half a month left.
