Winter Is Coming — What Can One Rely On?
The House of Stark slogan from the former Game of Thrones series has often been understood far too superficially. It is sometimes interpreted as a pessimistic outlook on life—as an excessive focus on the negative, instead of enjoying life. As needless worry about things that will most likely never happen, or which, even if they do occur, lie largely beyond one’s control. Such an interpretation is, in most cases, far more harmful than is commonly assumed.
The tragedy of life as the seasons
Most people come to understand the inevitability of life’s melancholy far too late, and tragedy is largely attributed to the external environment, to the behavioral failures of others, or to circumstantial factors. Yet more often than not, the issue lies purely in the relationship between the human being and the nature of life as lived—in a fundamental existential limitation.
This has been described optimistically in “The Old Man’s Song” by Juhan Viiding—a song sung by Papa Carlo (Geppetto) in the story of Buratino. The old father begins immediately from his happiness: the simple fact that he has a son, an heir. The existence of a child is always a source of joy, because the child represents the possibility of coping with the world better than the father himself managed to do. For this reason, a certain submission to life is already built into the song from the outset (“even if the hearth is painted, the fire still gives warmth—yes!”).
Aleksei Tolstoy, writing the story of Buratino based on the motifs of Pinocchio, understood this well, having felt the same himself. A father can paint a picture, but he cannot provide his son with a ready-made version of life that would lead to (home) warmth in its ontological sense. And yet it is often precisely the image a father leaves behind through the way he lives his own life that already points, on a certain level, toward an ideal. The work itself, however, must be done by the son; hence the reference to “continuing the life’s work and going further.”
Both Viiding and Tolstoy acknowledge that truth is eternal, and this is precisely the crucial question—truth exists. The mere fact that truth exists makes it possible to grasp something eternal, something that endures beyond both father and son. Throughout the song, a motif clearly emerges that unites Viiding and Tolstoy: the recognition of the inevitability of being overcome by life, yet at the same time a hopeful awareness that in living itself—when one lives in search of truth—there is something enduring. Something that stands above every individual life path and thus offers hope.
The tragedy of life and the “coming of winter” are inevitabilities built into existence itself. A father dies before his son, and in a certain sense must also send his son into the world to die. All that he can truly give his child is, within the limits of his best abilities, a description of what life is like, and the self-awareness and independence needed to step into it—precisely what Papa Carlo (Geppetto) did, to the best of his abilities, in the case of Buratino (Pinocchio).
The logic of sacrifice as preparation for life’s tragedy, and the mentality of abundance as its opposite
Both in working life and in life more broadly, the issue is rarely whether tragedy will arrive, but rather the precise moment at which it does. Most often, that moment is unfavorable—or even maximally unfavorable—and is experienced as several “bad things” collapsing into the same point in time. This logic, however, is naïve, because the causal chains that give rise to such situations usually begin much earlier.
It is largely naïve to speak of events that “strike a person unexpectedly,” since in most cases people have prepared these outcomes for themselves through their own systematic patterns of action. What can really be spoken of is merely the temporal point at which the consequences become visible. In cases of employee burnout, such patterns are extremely common, and without sufficient data about the individual, intervening at this stage often resembles an attempt to treat a gunshot wound with a bandage. The same dynamic unfolds in private life.
The simplest example of this mechanism is an approach to life rooted in the “mentality of abundance.” A person trains themselves to see life as far better than it actually is, and this is usually accompanied by a combination of poor decisions: the destruction of meaningful relationships, overconsumption, financial credit (loans, leases), and an irrational optimism projected into the future. This does not mean that a person should be incapable of seeing the good in life—that is essential for maintaining psychological health—but this “good” should not be extended to the inevitabilities of life itself.
By focusing on abundance, a person typically makes many foolish decisions at once, often of a material nature. It is not so much that life genuinely improves; rather, the person hides from reality and borrows against the future in order to preserve the illusion that things are going better.
In its essence, material loans and leases are nothing other than the diametrical opposite of sacrifice—namely, the act of bringing the expected outcome of one’s labor, time, and energy from the future into the present. In practical terms, this means prioritizing immediate pleasure and postponing sacrifice. Most people fail to grasp how dangerous this is, because the problems that will inevitably arrive in the future are waiting for them regardless.
The logic of sacrifice is the reverse: it is the prioritization of sacrifice now and the postponement of possible pleasure into the future. Although this may appear to run counter to the logic of contemporary consumerism and hedonism—and, in a broader geopolitical sense, to the endorsement of multiculturalism—it is most often the most effective way to cope with the inevitable difficulties built into the act of living itself.
All sacrifices made today are, in reality, made in advance to address future hardships. (I emphasize that I treat sacrifice here primarily as a psychological mechanism that shifts the burden of decision-making from the future into the present, thereby increasing the available reserve for coping in moments of crisis.) This is precisely what creates stable points of orientation in situations where several complex events “strike” a person at once. The notion of being “struck” is, of course, ironic here—because in such cases, it usually does not happen that way at all. A person who has not “borrowed” from the future moves through time with fewer demands imposed by life upon themselves, and as a result, their entire logic of coping in difficult situations is fundamentally different.
An unintuitive approach to crisis situations involving employees
Having conducted several thousand psychometric analyses, a very clear pattern emerges. In terms of an employee’s—and more broadly a person’s—capacity to cope with work and life, the quality of family life and close relationships is categorically more decisive than many other work-related nuances. Statistically, occupational well-being cannot compensate for traumatic experiences in one’s personal life by more than approximately 25–30% (this magnitude does not claim to represent a universal law, but rather reflects a recurring pattern observed in psychometric profiles and long-term observation-based analyses, in which occupational well-being clearly proves secondary to structural crises in personal life). Even by maximizing workplace “happiness,” it is not possible to make a person active, effective, and life-affirming if domestic tragedy—especially in the context of intimate relationships and family—occupies the majority of their mental capacity for conceptualizing the world.
In burnout prediction models, a recurring motif is a sharp decline in work performance following divorce, or during the period leading up to it. For this reason, many solutions associated with human resource management are, in terms of their emphasis, almost laughable: when a person enters a phase of personal-life tragedy, they can be “helped” at work in any way imaginable, yet the impact of such help is, by its very nature, severely limited.
The reason is simple: the relative weight of these life domains is fundamentally unequal. Something that previously functioned in the background and provided a stable sense of “normality”—the framework through which the person conceptualized the world—has collapsed. Such a situation will, sooner or later, affect roughly one third of key employees.
The unintuitive nature of addressing this phenomenon lies precisely in replacing a superficial approach with a substantive one. No matter how optimistically the situation is viewed, the benefit produced by additional financial compensation is always limited. In the case of an employee caught in a personal-life crisis, it works only long enough to eliminate the initial problems that money can solve—but no amount of rationally increased pay can ever guarantee long-term solutions.
As stated earlier, increasing satisfaction in a category that constitutes only about 25% of a person’s life does nothing to ensure overall mental stabilization, because in the larger picture the person remains in a low state.
The unintuitive solution is, once again, very simple in essence: facing the truth. (By “facing the truth” I mean here, above all, not emotional self-flagellation or automatic condemnation, but an honest mapping of one’s actual motives, choices, and their consequences—and, I will be honest, sometimes also a clear judgment that follows from this.) We have seen many leaders and specialists who, in such situations, try to flee from this confrontation with truth as far as possible. Yet it is precisely this that is the only thing that truly helps.
A harsh truth — sacrifice has largely been replaced by “living in the moment”
When a person, both as an employee and simply as a “living individual,” finds themselves in a situation where the burdens exceed what they can carry, the usual response is to focus on their innate strengths and to attempt to amplify motivation to keep moving forward. Undoubtedly, in the vast majority of cases there remains a substantial inner resource within the person to cope with the situation. Yet the typical methods used to “unlock” this resource are, more often than not, highly unproductive.
Over the years—particularly in the Nordic countries—we have seen that the most effective solution is, unfortunately, truth, coupled with a deep examination of the individual’s own role in shaping the situation at hand. We treat life as a wave-like, almost sinusoidal curve (though not symmetrically), taking life’s tragic dimension into account, and we examine closely the additional problems people have created for themselves—most often either through active self-sabotage or by allowing the destruction and erosion of their life’s foundations through consciously redirected attention elsewhere.
The results are usually extremely painful at first. For example, a person entering midlife after the end of a long-term relationship may collide with reality in a profoundly drastic way. What does this actually mean? Within the framework of Self Fusion analysis, we describe this as “rewinding and re-examining one’s life trajectory.” Put simply, it means “coming back down to earth.”
Most people perceive their life trajectory as moving upward: everything is abundant, beautiful, and good, and the direction is to the right and upward. Any downturns are seen as merely apparent—just a natural “run-up” to the next ascent. All of this, however, must be re-evaluated. Because when one is fully honest with oneself, the life curve contains multiple points from which onward the person chose to live in the moment rather than to think about the future.
A concrete example — the tragedy of a downward life trajectory
The following example should not be taken as a moral judgment of any particular group, but rather as an archetypal pattern that emerges under certain constellations of conditions, regardless of gender or cultural context. Let us consider a typical case: a woman in the latter half of her thirties who is compelled to begin life as a single mother, having previously been accustomed to a significantly above-average standard of living and financial freedom within a partnership. Often, under unclear circumstances and justified through the language of “self-discovery, self-realization, and the pursuit of happiness,” she leaves the relationship, and what is in fact a tragic event appears instead as the point from which her life trajectory is supposed to turn upward. Figuratively—most often in retrospective narration—people describe this moment as a movement toward “freedom,” “a world of limitless possibilities,” “independence,” “new connections,” “new opportunities,” “a wonderful new beginning,” or “proving oneself to the entire world.”
More often than not, relatively life-inexperienced and incompetent allies—lacking any real capacity to analyze the long-term prospects of such a situation—encourage this step and cheer “go girl,” partly out of human foolishness, partly out of a taste for intrigue, and sometimes even out of Schadenfreude.
In such situations, “liberation from the shackles of a long-term relationship” is accompanied by an intoxicating lightness and the pleasure of living in the moment. The person feels freed, as if she could suddenly sprint “a full marathon.” In reality, however, this state is accompanied by a large dose of naïveté, as groundlessness is replaced by the illusion of a “new and beautiful life.” During this phase, people often make an unusually large number of poor decisions in an astonishingly short period of time—decisions that destroy their future in terms of close relationships, offspring, and economic well-being.
This is precisely the moment when “living in the moment” becomes more important than sacrifice. Typically, one drastically overestimates one’s ability to cope independently, becomes attached to a sequence of shallow and non-prospective transactional relationships, and—after “sobering up,” usually about a year later—finds oneself facing the true tragedy of one’s situation. In substance, everything has often been lost: lifestyle, financial freedom, a life free of dependency disorders, health (both physical and mental), children, value as a prospective long-term partner, and frequently even self-respect.
Most tragic of all, however, is the loss of a future horizon. No matter how desperately one attempts to redraw the dotted line that was supposed to guarantee an upward trajectory, one is forced—and usually admits this once becoming honest with oneself—to pull one’s life curve sharply downward, looking back at events that transformed what once seemed like a point of ascent into a point of decline.
If a person has not prepared for such situations and has not formed that which “remains when everything else is taken away,” the ground disappears from beneath their feet and groundlessness turns into clinging. Most often, one clings—frequently only partially consciously—to short-term intimate relationships with a partner “on whom a bet was placed,” failing to understand that without genuine independence one is imposing fundamentally impossible demands on the other. No external person can carry, in addition to their own life burdens, the tragedy of a groundless partner. The result is usually the destruction of two lives and the remaining fragments of both parties’ mental health.
Regrettably, what alone can “remain when everything else is removed” is alignment with vertically ordered, fundamental values—values that remove nearly all decision-making tension, because the answers are already known. This is why people who have achieved clarity early on regarding their structured internal value hierarchies (SIVH) are able to remain significantly more resilient in crisis situations.
A person in a state of groundlessness arrives behaviorally at the same conclusions reached by King Solomon in the Bible when he observed that life is essentially meaningless if a human being attempts to be their own god. Put plainly, the absence of intrinsic meaning in life and defeat by existential suffering go hand in hand: each time the next—often “well-earned”—blow of fate knocks a person further downward, they have nothing to counter suffering with except self-justification and the adoption of the victim role. To introduce meaning back into the equation would require an honest sacrifice—a fundamental transformation in how one inhabits the experience of being alive.
The superficiality of most therapeutic approaches
Since I have received reflexive criticism on this point in trainings, I note for clarity that the following division does not claim to provide an exhaustive mapping of therapeutic schools, but rather points to two dominant emphases that recur in practice (e.g., dynamic approaches versus behavioral ones). Most therapeutic approaches can be divided into two categories when it comes to dealing with the past. First, those that consider the role of the past and childhood (sometimes also the life tragedies of one’s parents) to be extremely significant, and that link the present situation to the repetition of unconscious patterns. Second, those that allow a person to detach from the past and immediately “enter the present moment,” shaping the future as if it were independent of what has come before.
Both approaches, however, are often deficient precisely in terms of personal responsibility. In the first case, the individual is given ample “talking points” for absolving themselves of responsibility (because their childhood has made them this way). In the second case, an opportunity opens up for the endless “redefinition” of the past.
Within the axiomatological approach—which we have applied both in consultations and in corporate contexts—it is only possible to speak of identity as continuous across time, of the radical acceptance of the past (taking 100% responsibility for what has occurred), and only then of assigning a moral evaluation to it through an existing structured hierarchy of values. Naturally, this gives rise to numerous catharsis-like moments, because the individual comes to acknowledge that even in the present moment they are acting in clear contradiction to their internal (desired) value hierarchy. It is precisely for this reason that the path toward change can begin—not through justification, but through self-condemnation.
Unfortunately, this also means that a person must condemn a large portion of their own identity, and this is exceedingly difficult to do without any firm ground to stand on. It is here that the importance of clearly structured internal value hierarchies comes into play, along with their application precisely in situations where there is little else to rely on.
The misinterpretation of karma and inner certainty
In its essence, the concept of karma in Eastern philosophies does not differ, in a functional sense, from the figure of Jesus Christ as he appears in the Book of Revelation—one who judges and restores balance through truth and justice, through both forgiveness and punishment. The older a person becomes, the harder it is to cultivate within oneself the myth that one can simply “detach” from the mistakes of the past, or escape punishment for the harm caused by them. (I note here, for the sake of clarity, that the comparison between karma and Christian justice is by no means a doctrinal equation, but primarily a functional one: in both cases, the restoration of moral order is described as occurring through a confrontation with truth, rather than through subjective emotional states.)
At its core, the attainment of “balance” is most often connected to repayment for life’s tragedy—for the suffering added through unjustified wrongdoing. If a person has done this, then, inevitably, they will pay for it, regardless of whether they believe themselves to have escaped the consequences. Most often, the person senses this themselves: they understand that they have done one or several things very wrong.
This is where lying enters the picture. It serves one of two purposes: either to prolong receiving from life something one has not actually earned, or, at a certain point, to postpone punishment for what one has done. In both cases—and most often the first precedes the second—the arrival of balance is delayed.
Herein lies the true nature of karma (or of religious concepts of balance). It is not an external intervention carried out by cosmic forces, “the universe,” or God. In its essence, it is an internal breaking point within the human being. Persistent self-deception, combined with the desire to escape unatoned harm inflicted on others, leads not only to inner emptiness but to a deep hopelessness regarding the future.
At some point—and we have witnessed this hundreds of times—a person becomes aware that “they are no longer entirely certain they will manage no matter what.” This can be phrased in many ways, but the meaning remains the same. This is where the crux of the matter lies (or, as Hamlet put it, “there’s the rub”).
When a person knows that the way they have lived is not aligned with any timeless, fundamental logic, then they have lived purely in pursuit of their own happiness and interests—and that is not sustainable. The consequence is the loss of inner certainty, and this loss is entirely justified. The structure of reality they have constructed for themselves—held together only by self-suggestion and the approval of certain close others (who themselves often sense that such a life philosophy is not sustainable)—is simply not in harmony with the nature of life.
Thus comes the point at which illusions are replaced by suffering, and this marks only the beginning of a very long process of change. Karma is not, in its essence, an attack from the outside, but from within. It is the loss of that inner sense which enables a person—whose life is aligned with clear, timeless value hierarchies—to cope even in difficult circumstances. (By verticality I do not mean any specific ideology, but rather an ordering of values that transcends immediate gain and whose violation leads to predictable existential consequences.)
Such people are possessed by the conviction that “they will manage, no matter what”—and they do. Not because life is easy, but because they are inwardly convinced that the deeper motives of their actions are bound to honest sacrifice rather than the pursuit of short-term pleasure.
Without wishing to speak too explicitly from the Bible once again, I will note only the Sermon on the Mount’s reference to the same phenomenon “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” (Gospel of Matthew 6:34) In essence, Jesus articulates the same logic here with complete clarity: if a person’s actions are, in the larger scheme, aligned with striving toward an ideal, and if they sacrifice their potential in accordance with the inner logic of life itself, then the resolution of fundamental existential problems becomes inevitable. Conversely, when one focuses solely on personal well-being, it may be possible to cope with existential problems temporarily, but such a solution inevitably leads to chaos in the long run.
An employer’s ability to intervene effectively diminishes proportionally over time
When a person’s life is already in a tragic downward phase, there is little an employer can do beyond helping the individual recognize their own mistakes. The sad reality is that, by this point, occupational burnout is often inevitable. The person becomes something like a zombie—still “showing up to work,” yet with effectiveness and proactivity reduced to regrettably low levels. Even the most generous support package offered by an employer would, in such a situation, at best postpone the problems rather than resolve them.
The solution? The only truly effective solution is prevention. All options diminish over time. The more clearly a person understands their responsibility, in the present moment, as the architect of their own future and that of their family, the greater the chances of avoiding situations in which “the ground disappears from beneath their feet.”
Unfortunately, this cannot be achieved without a clearly structured internal value hierarchy—something that provides, in advance, a framework according to which life choices are made. Mistakes are human, but to anticipate an approaching crisis (which is, regrettably, inevitable), it is essential to reach a state in which the internal value system is clear and capable of reversing smaller errors made over time. This, in turn, significantly increases the available free potential in a crisis situation, making it possible to remain healthy physically, mentally, and as a worker.
Mistakes have been made, but first one can stop adding new ones, and then begin to “root out” several of them, starting with the most impactful. At this point, the interests of employer and employee begin to align. If the psychometric foundation supports it, and the employee is open even to modest personality-level changes, it becomes possible—through regular, minimally sufficient intervention—to achieve substantially greater resilience in crisis situations.
This is precisely the right way to “prepare for winter”: not by ignoring the possibility of life’s impending tragedy, but by making oneself stronger in order to cope with it. In a sense, it means breaking one’s own “painted hearth” and facing the reality that lies behind it. Only in this way can one avoid remaining forever in a state of waiting for warmth from a painted fire.
We are, at the same time, both Geppetto and Pinocchio. We are who we are today, and we are also who must face the world tomorrow. An unpopular truth for some is that we cannot live only in the present; we must live simultaneously in the present and the future. Geppetto dies—what we are today is, in a sense, already the past. We continue living as Pinocchio, who must cope with the reality behind the canvas. That is why it is worth pulling the future into the present and understanding how today’s mistakes alter the survival capacity of our future selves.
Winter is coming—it is inevitable, expected, and tragic. But perhaps today is the best day to stop weakening our future selves through illusions, “living in the moment,” and the “myth of abundance,” and to begin perceiving life as a whole—with all its difficulties—and to face them with a hardening, uncompromising honesty. Thus, the recognition that “Winter is coming” does not point to the anticipation of catastrophe or to a self-fulfilling prophecy, but rather to the need to structure life in a way that does not presume the constant presence of favorable conditions, and that is grounded in the creation of meaning rather than in the unsustainable pursuit of an abstract and essentially empty sense of happiness.
