How to actually look forward to winter
Life Kit
NPR
4.5 • 4.9K Ratings
🗓️ 24 November 2025
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This message comes from TED Talks Daily, a podcast from TED, bringing you new ideas every day through TED Talks and conversations. |
| 0:08.2 | Learn about the ideas shaping humanity, from connecting with your inner monologue to unlocking healthy love. |
| 0:14.7 | Listen to TED Talks Daily. |
| 0:17.3 | You're listening to Life Kit from NPR. |
| 0:23.9 | Hey, everybody. You're listening to Life Kit from NPR. Hey everybody, it's Mariel. |
| 0:27.1 | You know, I feel like certain months and seasons just have a really good marketing team. |
| 0:32.7 | Like, everybody loves fall, the colored leaves, the pumpkin spice, everything, the magic of Halloween. |
| 0:39.4 | And my God, the way people talk about summer, as if it's just a string of perfect days, we spend |
| 0:44.5 | basking in the sunshine, eating popsicles, going to the beach with friends. The truth is, |
| 0:51.0 | every season comes with its own indignities. Like the amount of time I've spent standing on a subway platform in 95-degree heat, |
| 0:59.0 | sweating bullets and scratching my mosquito bites while I wait for the train. |
| 1:03.0 | But we ignore all that, choosing to think of some seasons as this romantic ideal. |
| 1:07.7 | And then we don't extend the same courtesy to winter, especially January and February. |
| 1:13.4 | When we imagine winter, we imagine it based on its worst day. |
| 1:18.4 | So we imagine the coldest, wettest, windiest, darkest day, even when that day is not the norm. |
| 1:27.8 | Carrie Leibowitz grew up on the Jersey Shore. |
| 1:30.2 | It's a summer destination. |
| 1:31.5 | And she says, on the Jersey Shore, everybody knows. |
| 1:34.9 | Winter sucks. |
| 1:36.2 | It is this cultural knowing and it's such an ingrained knowing that it doesn't feel like an |
| 1:43.1 | opinion. |
| 1:43.7 | It feels like a fact, right? |
... |
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