I've heard of it but never read it, but after your comment, I'm going to. I never really made the connection between [what I understood] that book/ideology to be about, and this idea that I'm moving toward. Now that you say it, though, the relationship seems clear and obvious. Thanks for the suggestion!

Years ago the idea of cycles was one of the first big, weird ideas that captured my mind. It works at so many levels - there's the seasons, as you say. Then there's the foundational rhythms that have been annihilated by modern life, the most obvious being sleep / wake with the sun; and fast and breaking-of-fast. A ton of physiological processes assume these exist, we have giant cascading chains that depend on them being there. And now they're mostly absent, and weird when they do exist.

I think you're onto something big with that one. I'm seasoned enough to know that all problems don't just melt away if people are generally healthy (in all reasonable senses of that) and have enough (in all reasonable senses of that) but man, 90% of it melts away. Miserable bastards cause more misery, that's a consistent truth in my experience.