Dead Project - Community for the other SAD

This is part of a planned series of posts about dead or frozen projects - ideas I’ve had that I’ve decided not to follow up on.

I’ll be writing these up for a variety of reasons:

• To encourage others to share their own ideas.
• To get feedback on whether I should have tried to do more with the idea, was there an angle or benefit that I missed?
• To demonstrate how many ideas I have, and to help determine whether the number of ideas I have is unusual.
• So others can highlight to me whether someone has tried the idea already, and whether it succeeded or not.

Also sharing these kind of “dead projects” has been an idea that’s been rattling around my brain for some time, but I’ve finally been inspired to start writing them up after attending one of Stefan Hagar’s Valhalla For Ideas sessions. Valhalla for Ideas is a structured way of working through old plans that we’re hanging onto, to either let them go, or to breathe new life into them. You can read more about Stefan’s services here, and we may be working together on some of them in future.

Description

SAD, or Seasonally Affective Disorder, “is a mood disorder subset in which people who typically have normal mental health throughout most of the year exhibit depressive symptoms at the same time each year”¹. I believe it’s far more commonly associated with the onset of winter due to the reduction in daylight hours.

However I always find the summer far more unpleasant than the winter. You can always wear more clothes, turn the heating up more, stay inside more… but dealing with an abundance of light and heat is practically much harder. And more instinctively I just dislike the summer, but I don’t know whether that’s due to the connotations it has, or whether it’s more subconscious than that.

So, I considered building some kind of community around this. Partly just to find out how common it was to be affected by the summer rather than the winter, partly to see if there was a financial benefit to running somewhere for people to share tips and ideas and relevant product reviews, and partly because the Internet can be so helpful for people when they realise they’re not the only one with a particular quirk that seems rare.

Why I didn’t try this project

• I’ve too many other ideas that I’m more interested in to devote time to this one.
• I like the idea of just acknowledging that this condition exists, but this could end up being so much more, which then gets into psychological or medical areas I don’t know, and don’t have the time or surplus effort to research.
• I really like the idea of building or running a community, but I’m conscious of how difficult that can be, and taking responsibility for a fairly random group of participants requires skills I don’t believe I have, and don’t want to develop.

Overall I think this falls into the category of “things I wish existed” and/or “groups I might belong to” rather than “things I would like to have built”.

Summary

All feedback welcome of course, come find me on Mastodon or BlueSky or LinkedIn, whichever platform you prefer.

And as with Stefan’s offering, I wonder if there’s a service in helping others choose which of their projects to pursue, and which to put to one side? I struggle with this myself, but I’ve had great feedback from others when I’ve helped them think this kind of issue through. Either as personal consultancy, or even helping people work through many of the decision making frameworks out there so they can do this themselves, with all the timing and privacy benefits that come with working alone?