Announcer:
All the Feelings presents Still Adulting. This episode: Recycling and Seasonal Stuff.
Tommy Metz III:
Hello everyone and welcome back. Thank you so much for joining us on All the Feelings, colon, Still Adulting.
Pete Wright:
Thank you so much for joining us on All the Feelings prologue Still Adulting.
Tommy Metz III:
And this is an exciting episode. This is the last episode of our 11th season. Eleven-twelve. Pete, how are you feeling? It’s been a long, hard trek, but of fun. Of fun and enjoyment. TI turns it around.
Pete Wright:
It was really great. It was kind of a Hail Mary pass there, and you caught it.
Tommy Metz III:
Yeah. It’s the Oregon Trail of excitement.
Pete Wright:
Everybody, this week: dysentery. We are doing great. This has been a really fun season. I think we’ve set ourselves up— this is what I like to think of as this episode. We’ve written ourselves into a corner with our topic choices.
Tommy Metz III:
Yeah. We didn’t run out of topics.
Pete Wright:
It’s a real mystery box.
Tommy Metz III:
We just chose all the other good ones and now we have this one. So we had a couple left and we challenged each other on what’s the worst topic to give the other person.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. What is that work?
Tommy Metz III:
I chose seasonal stuff because I remember, I don’t do anything for seasonal stuff, so what are you going to talk about?
Pete Wright:
But I don’t know. What do you think of that?
Tommy Metz III:
Then I remember you have a house.
Pete Wright:
Then I remember after the house— did you know.
Tommy Metz III:
Damn it! You totally have stuff to talk about. And you gave me trash and recycling.
Pete Wright:
Oh dear.
Tommy Metz III:
Waaaa! Banger! Banger!
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
What did we decide the opposite of a banger is?
Pete Wright:
This is gonna be great.
Tommy Metz III:
A whimper.
Pete Wright:
A whimper.
Tommy Metz III:
That’s right.
Pete Wright:
Yes, it’s a whimper.
Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
And that’s where we are this week, but don’t stop listening because this is bound to get interesting.
Tommy Metz III:
Yes, just marinate in the desperation of us trying to get this last episode out. Thank you so much for joining us. And hey, trash and recycling. Let’s give the people what they want. Should I go ahead and go first?
Pete Wright:
I think you’re up.
Tommy Metz III:
All right.
Pete Wright:
Oh, wait a minute. I’m supposed to say cue that subset.
Announcer:
Subset one. Recycling and trash.
Tommy Metz III:
Okay, Pete, as we’ve said, it’s the last episode of the 11th season. You assigned me potentially the worst topic on our list of possible topics. So as a result, first of all, I’m gonna throw away trash and I’m just going to talk about recycling because trash is trash. And because you forced me to do this, I’m gonna start right with you. Hey, spotlight.
Pete Wright:
Oh no.
Tommy Metz III:
Hey, hotshot. Do you and your family recycle? And if so, how do you do it?
Pete Wright:
Yes, we do. We have recycle bins and bags underneath a very strange closet in our kitchen. And when we have something to recycle, we put it there. We have a second bin outside that we drag to the curb, which is recycling. We also subscribe to a service called Ridwell.
Tommy Metz III:
Oh, that’s— okay, go ahead.
Pete Wright:
We like Ridwell because they take the stuff that’s hard to recycle.
Tommy Metz III:
I think I’ve heard of that.
Pete Wright:
They take things like batteries and old shoes and stretchable plastics and shiny plastics, and there’s different bags for everything. And, sidebar, there is a mafia-level garbage fight going on in our neighborhood.
Tommy Metz III:
Okay.
Pete Wright:
As such, our entrenched, decades-long entrenched garbage infrastructure company—
Tommy Metz III:
Mm-hmm. Big trash.
Pete Wright:
Big trash has petitioned not to let Ridwell operate in our community.
Tommy Metz III:
Why? Because they don’t want the competition.
Pete Wright:
Because it’s competition. And they also don’t want to invest in proper recycling. So they don’t take all of the hard-to-recycle stuff. They just figure one day we will, so we want to make sure that the slate is clean and nobody’s invested in this. So Ridwell has actually started a mail-order program— there’s no bins outside in our neighborhood. They send us bags, we fill the bags, and we mail the recycling to Ridwell once a month, and they take it away from us.
Tommy Metz III:
Do they pay for the shipping?
Pete Wright:
It’s part of the subscription. It’s all baked in. It’s a very strange model.
Tommy Metz III:
You’re mailing garbage.
Pete Wright:
It’s all in a hope. Yeah, we’re mailing garbage. It’s so weird, man. It’s weird, but I live in Oregon. You’re California.
Tommy Metz III:
Sure.
Pete Wright:
You gotta know something about that. It’s just part of the aesthetic.
Tommy Metz III:
No, absolutely. And we’re actually going to be talking about Oregon a little bit later in this segment, so get excited. Well, that was all much more exciting than I was thinking it was going to be. I have three blue bins in my apartment building. The end. There’s one thing that’s going on in my building— speaking of mafia-style battles, they’re in a huge ongoing battle against people that will not break down their big cardboard boxes of stuff that comes in. So they just throw an entire unfolded box, which takes up an entire bin.
Pete Wright:
Oh yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
And all we do is have more and more signs put up. It started to be like, “Remember, as a good neighbor, we—” and now it’s just like, “Please.”
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
“Please break down your cardboard boxes.” I mean, the font would just be “pleaded.” That would be the name of the font that they’re using.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
It’s very bad. Okay. Well, I realized that I don’t know much about recycling, and so I did way too much research. And I’m not going to share it with you or anybody because no one wants to know about that.
Pete Wright:
Oh good.
Tommy Metz III:
But I am going to share with you a few interesting parts. Would you like to hear them?
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
And you said so many things— Ridwell and shiny plastic. There’s a good chance you know a lot of this stuff.
Pete Wright:
Okay.
Tommy Metz III:
But let’s learn together. And if you do know something, pretend you don’t know.
Pete Wright:
That is an easy bar.
Tommy Metz III:
How would you want to start? Do you want to start with plastic? Let’s start with plastic.
Pete Wright:
Let’s start with plastic.
Tommy Metz III:
Everything about how we recycle plastic has been perfect and on board. Do you think that’s true or false?
Pete Wright:
So we’re starting with a quiz, and I’ll go ahead and say it’s harrowing.
Tommy Metz III:
Yes, it is very harrowing.
Pete Wright:
Things have not been going great with plastic is probably the truth, because you’re asking the question, but not something that I would know.
Tommy Metz III:
Well, let me give you a clue. This segment is titled “The Big Lie of Recycled Plastic.” Here we go. In 1984, the Society of Plastics Industry established plastics recycling, bringing together petrochemical companies and bottlers, and they launched a campaign focused on that industry’s commitment to recycling. And in 1988, the trade group rolled out the chasing arrows symbol, you know of which I’m talking about, the widely recognized symbol for recyclable plastic, and began using it on packaging. All of that sounds great, right?
Pete Wright:
Totally great. I’m on board.
Tommy Metz III:
Around the same time, the plastic industry already knew that recycling wasn’t solving really any problems. Almost at all. Internal reports from 1986 from a trade association known as the Vinyl Institute noted that, quote, “recycling cannot be considered a permanent solid waste solution to plastics as it merely prolongs the time until an item is disposed of.” And other quote, “recycling cannot go on indefinitely and does not solve the solid waste problem.” It is not economical. Certain advances like chemical-based recycling can cause more pollution than it’s worth, and plastic quality degrades each time it is recycled, so it’s only valuable maybe once or twice, as opposed to ads from plastic agencies claiming that a bottle can come back over and over and over and over again forever. They’re just straight-up lying to us and they knew that they were lying. Fun.
Pete Wright:
Are they the ones who actually pitched as a potential solution giant floating barge of trash the size of Madagascar in our oceans? I think that was their solution. Just put it in the ocean.
Tommy Metz III:
I think, yeah, let’s put it— and then the plan was to sink it, but they forgot.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
They didn’t make the comically large plug at the bottom that you can go—
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
And then the whole thing would sink. So it just sails around and sails around.
Pete Wright:
It just floats.
Tommy Metz III:
Yeah. Okay, so plastic— we know now, I’m sorry, that they knew right from the beginning it was more about optics instead of actually trying to save the world. The biggest thing that we can know about plastic, and we’ll come back to this, is you’ve heard the phrase reduce, reuse, and recycle.
Pete Wright:
Yes, for sure.
Tommy Metz III:
There’s a reason recycle is listed last, and all experts agree. Reducing and reusing is the name of the game. Recycling has always been the least effective of the three overall. There’s hope coming at the very end of this.
Pete Wright:
Do you know what’s funny?
Tommy Metz III:
Yes.
Pete Wright:
I’ve never thought of it as three separate choices.
Tommy Metz III:
Right.
Pete Wright:
I’ve always thought of it as a cycle. First I’m gonna reduce and then what I use less of I reuse. And then when it’s done I recycle, and all of those are of equal weight. I’ve never considered anything other than that.
Tommy Metz III:
That there’s an actual order to it?
Pete Wright:
Yes.
Tommy Metz III:
That’s what they want you to think. Plastic!
Pete Wright:
God, big plastic.
Tommy Metz III:
Okay, so let’s go on to number two. So that’s number one, the lie of plastic. Number two, I already brought up the chasing arrows. Now the chasing arrows, it’s generally a triangle of three arrows pointing at each other, all with a number inside. And that’s very, very different— I mean that’s very, very similar, the opposite of different, to the naturally— everyone knows about the recycling, which is three arrows, also in a triangle.
Pete Wright:
Yes.
Tommy Metz III:
But this is a little bit different. Do you know what the chasing arrows with the number inside is? What is it saying?
Pete Wright:
Ugh. It’s very confusing. My understanding is it is defining a class of recyclable material. That some things you recycle in one way and some numbers you recycle in another way, and not all chasing arrows are equal. Am I even in the ballpark?
Tommy Metz III:
You own the ballpark, Pete. You are exactly right. The triangle is actually— it’s called an RIC. It’s a resin identification code. The number inside the triangle tells you what type of plastic resin was used to make the program, and that’s it.
Pete Wright:
Okay.
Tommy Metz III:
Let’s go back to the chasing arrows design. Experts have condemned the chasing arrow design because they say it misleads consumers about what is recyclable and what isn’t, because it looks so much like the recycling symbol.
Pete Wright:
Right.
Tommy Metz III:
To wit, in 2013, the EPA recommended a revision to it. So instead of having the arrows, it’s just lines.
Pete Wright:
Right.
Tommy Metz III:
But everyone had already made the mold and so almost nobody switched. We’re still using the old one and consumers don’t even notice the difference between any arrows or just lines.
Pete Wright:
Right. Because do they even look at the number? I would love to know what the percentage of people who actually ever look at the number if they’re not Ridwell customers, because you have to.
Tommy Metz III:
No. I think you just look at the bottom, you see the arrows, and you’re like, great, and you chuck it in.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. I think so too.
Tommy Metz III:
No, it’s a resin identification code. The number tells recyclers whether or not the product is generally recyclable. The numbers are one through seven.
Pete Wright:
One.
Tommy Metz III:
One, two, and five are generally accepted by most city recycling centers. All the others, no. Way too hard. They’re economically and energy intensive and they usually just gum up the works.
Pete Wright:
Wow.
Tommy Metz III:
When you put in something that is three, four, six, seven, anything like that in a bin, you can cause a breakdown in the process. Which brings us to element three. Have you heard of the term wishcycling? I liked this.
Pete Wright:
No, I haven’t heard of it, but I think I understand it right away.
Tommy Metz III:
It’s wishcycling, or aspirational recycling. Too many non-recyclable— okay, so it’s called wishcycling because consumers are like, “I hope this is recyclable. I don’t know what this number means.”
Pete Wright:
Right.
Tommy Metz III:
And so you throw it in with everything else. Too many non-recyclable items thrown in actually contaminate a batch of recycling. That means waste managers might not be able to find buyers for the materials and contaminated loads of recycling are just sent to the landfill instead.
Pete Wright:
Wow.
Tommy Metz III:
Let’s go over real quick some of the biggest offenders of wishcycling. Meaning these are things that are thrown in with recycling but can actually spoil the entire bin. Wait, is there a possible— let’s make this first one a game, okay?
Pete Wright:
Okay.
Tommy Metz III:
Can I just— of course.
Pete Wright:
Can I just ask one more time? You said one, two, and five are okay?
Tommy Metz III:
Sometimes five. One and two, definitely.
Pete Wright:
Sometimes five.
Tommy Metz III:
Sometimes five. All the rest need, like, robots and telepathy and all sorts of— it’s very, very difficult.
Pete Wright:
Okay. Telepathy. Okay, that’s hardcore.
Tommy Metz III:
Yes.
Pete Wright:
All right, go.
Tommy Metz III:
Okay, I’m changing the game in real time. If you thought of a store, a company who has a store and right across the street it’s the exact same store, what company am I talking about?
Pete Wright:
Oh, Starbucks.
Tommy Metz III:
Starbucks. I guess that wasn’t really a game. Yes. Biggest offender of wishcycling, we are looking at you, Starbucks. Disposable coffee cups, single-use coffee cups. It seems like it would be recyclable. But most single-use cups are lined with— and I think you were talking about this with shiny plastic— a fine film of polyethylene. It makes the cups liquid-proof and keeps the liquid inside really hot. But it’s incredibly difficult and expensive to reprocess because the materials have to be separated, and that’s really, really hard to do. Most— oh, you got something?
Pete Wright:
Can I have a sidebar? It’s a really quick sidebar. Are you ready for this? There is a company that makes paper products that are very expensive, but they are explicitly out of used coffee cups. Like they acquire them— they’re out of the UK and they acquire them—
Tommy Metz III:
Really?
Pete Wright:
I have these two notepads that are beautiful and wonderful paper. They feel different. They feel appreciably different than paper.
Tommy Metz III:
Yeah, the paper does.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, it really does. I get it now. And I think that’s one of those things like recycling. So what are you even supposed to put in the recycling basket in Starbucks? Anything? Like their food is coded— their food paper is coded.
Tommy Metz III:
Pretty much not. I mean, I just did research about the cups, and it just means that an estimated four billion cups a year are sold by Starbucks, just end up in landfills. Rats!
Pete Wright:
Unbelievable.
Tommy Metz III:
Yep. That is horrible.
Pete Wright:
That is horrible.
Tommy Metz III:
And it makes sense that you said, “Oh, look, we could use these coffee cups to make this beautiful thing of paper,” but you also said the keyword was expensive.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
It’s a niche.
Pete Wright:
It’s hard to do and we don’t have the infrastructure. Nobody has put the infrastructure behind the hard things.
Tommy Metz III:
Correct.
Pete Wright:
And it’s a hard thing that would get cheaper if more people did it.
Tommy Metz III:
Yes, but we’re not doing it because barges aren’t gonna float around themselves.
Pete Wright:
No.
Tommy Metz III:
Okay, number two, another common offender is pizza boxes. Waste managers are saying these are things that we just can’t do stuff with. The problem is, when oil seeps into the cardboard, the oil cannot be separated from the fiber, making the material less valuable, less marketable to buyers. They suggest recycling the top.
Pete Wright:
Okay.
Tommy Metz III:
Throw away the bottom, recycle the top, because— unless it’s a real oil fest, then just throw the rest of the whole thing away.
Pete Wright:
Wow. Okay, that’s really interesting. I mean, oil, that makes total sense. I also would have thought— I know people recycle pizza boxes that also have like sauce and cheese and stuff still on them. And I think that cheese would be the gumming factor.
Tommy Metz III:
Yes. And that actually brings us perfectly to the last one that I’m going to bring up, which is oily takeout containers. So not just pizza boxes, but in general, even if a container is labeled correctly for recycling in your area, food residue messes it up. Unfortunately— and you don’t need to rinse it completely, like sparkling clean, because you don’t want to waste a bunch of water, but you have to rinse it out. And Pete, you Portlanders will be wild for this one. Oregon Waste Management Specialist Jackie Lang. You know Jackie.
Pete Wright:
Ah, down the street.
Tommy Metz III:
Says washing food scraps from recyclables can be just as important as putting the right thing in the recycling bin. Thank you, Jackie, for your service.
Pete Wright:
Oh, thanks, Jackie from the block, as we know her.
Tommy Metz III:
Yep. And then do we want to talk about number four? It’s very sad. We’re going to talk about number four. And then there’s going to be hope. I’ve been talking about buyers of waste— like the waste managers take them and then you can sell them to places. Where do you think it’s going?
Pete Wright:
Well, Bozeman, I don’t know.
Tommy Metz III:
I don’t know what that is, I’m sorry.
Pete Wright:
Montana.
Tommy Metz III:
Got it. Yes, you just named a place.
Pete Wright:
I just named a place. China, right? It was going to China.
Tommy Metz III:
It was going to China. Around 2018 they changed their rules where the recyclable packages couldn’t have any more than point five of stuff coming up the works. And so the biggest buyer of it went way, way, way down.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
And who took their place? Well, now we’re getting into the industry of waste exporting. A Guardian investigation has found that hundreds of thousands of tons of U.S. plastic are being shipped every year to poorly regulated developing countries around the globe for the dirty, labor-intensive process of recycling.
Pete Wright:
Oh god.
Tommy Metz III:
Villagers in these places are paid tiny wages to spend all day peeling off the non-recyclable elements from garbage and sorting them into recyclable and non-recyclable. This of course leads to huge amounts of pollution in their villages. The newest hotspots for handling U.S. plastic are some of the world’s poorest countries, including Bangladesh, Laos, Ethiopia, and Senegal. And one of the reasons that we go there is it’s cheap labor and almost no environmental regulation. Rats!
Pete Wright:
Okay.
Tommy Metz III:
America, USA, USA.
Pete Wright:
That’s bad news.
Tommy Metz III:
Very sad. All of this is rough stuff. Let’s just remember: reuse, reduce, and then recycle. I wouldn’t leave you hanging, Pete. Would you like a little bit of hope on the horizon?
Pete Wright:
Okay.
Tommy Metz III:
Gross. I don’t care for that phrase when I’m talking about trash and recycling. Would you believe that we might have a miracle coming our way? And it’s from Austin, Texas. Huh?
Pete Wright:
Of all places.
Tommy Metz III:
Enzymes. Pete, an enzyme variant has been created by engineers and scientists at the University of Texas at Austin that can break down plastics that typically take centuries to degrade in just a matter of hours.
Pete Wright:
What?
Tommy Metz III:
I know. In effect, the enzyme eats the harmful parts of the plastic, like the polyurethane, breaks it down to monomers. What are those? No one knows. And then can chemically put them back together through repolymerization for clean reuse. This is the promise. This is what we’ve been told we’ve been doing all of this time. And sometimes they can take an enormous amount of plastic, put it through this process, and within 24 hours, it’s clean and it’s back and it’s ready to be used.
Pete Wright:
What?
Tommy Metz III:
And this is just happening. This is happening, like, within the last year and a half is when they released this. They published a huge paper in Nature magazine. And people went nuts and they’re just going through the process of trying to figure out the best way to get it to the world.
Pete Wright:
Wait a minute. You said something that I’m really stuck on, which is it eats the enzymes.
Tommy Metz III:
That’s my words.
Pete Wright:
I know, but then it puts it back together somehow? Like what are you left with? What is the result? Like plastic pebbles?
Tommy Metz III:
The— well, unfortunately it’s the monomers, and I didn’t look up what monomers are.
Pete Wright:
We don’t know what a monomer is.
Tommy Metz III:
Eats. It’s the point that it takes away all of the— you know, the things that the villagers are separating, the parts of the coffee cup that can’t be recycled, the polyurethane, it takes all of that away. And then you’re back to just the original product. Less of it, but still the same.
Pete Wright:
So you’re telling me to focus on the good stuff and just stop asking questions, really, is where we are.
Tommy Metz III:
Yeah, I really didn’t want you to bring up monomers because I realized as I was writing it, there’s a chance I misspelled a word and it’s not even monomers. I think it is. But yeah, so we have— there are people, not enough, but there are people working extremely hard that have not given up, like the plastic industry did almost immediately, on trying to make this a reality, that we are still working on making this happen. And so that gives me a lot of hope.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
I like that people, scientists and engineers, are using their time to figure this stuff out instead of, like, another boner pill.
Pete Wright:
It is a recipe for a hell of a—
Tommy Metz III:
Unfortunately—
Pete Wright:
Horror movie, though. Like, what happens when the enzyme gets out, right? We saw The Blob. It doesn’t go well. I look around my office and everything’s made of some sort of plastic. Like, it could just dissolve right. Like my clocks will dissolve off the wall. What if this enzyme is airborne, Tom?
Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
We’re all in it. Planes are falling out of the sky. I don’t mean to take your hope and light it on fire, but this is a terrifying turn of events.
Tommy Metz III:
No, it’s a dystopian situation. And then you accidentally spill a little bit of the enzyme on your hand, and it’s like—
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
“Wait a minute, this tastes better than plastic.”
Pete Wright:
Well.
Tommy Metz III:
And then it is I Am Legend slash Dawn of the Dead across the entire place.
Pete Wright:
It is. Tom, we are all— like, I think it’s 60% microplastics now as human beings.
Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
What happens if the enzyme touches us?
Tommy Metz III:
I’m pretty sure we will be reduced and then reused for food and then recycled to bones.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, to monomers. Okay, this is bad news. This is bad news all around. Your hope is nothing.
Tommy Metz III:
And now, excerpts from a rubbish poem by Hell P.
Pete Wright:
Behold the dump, where treasures lie, a mountain of muck that scrapes the sky, beneath its stench a tale unfolds of yesterday’s riches and forgotten gold. For in the hands of those who sort, each refuse pile becomes their art, compost whispers to the trees, while metal meets its melted destiny. The landfill groans, but it’s alive, a sign that human life will thrive. Through waste we learned, there’s beauty still, in things we thought were void of will. So raise a glass to what we toss, to workers salvaging from loss, in rubbish heaps of future weights, in waste we find what recreates.
Tommy Metz III:
And finally, there’s the harrowing tale of the time fed-up voters in Brazil expressed their outrage in an important city council election by voting for garbage. In 1959, São Paulo, Brazil’s most populous city, was a mess. Government corruption was rampant, leading to uncollected garbage, overflowing sewers, and skyrocketing inflation. The population was disgusted and decided to make their rage known in the upcoming city council election. Faced with a crowded field of 540 candidates, with many failing to even hide their shady dealings, the Brazilians decided to add one more candidate to the race. You know, as a goof.
One year earlier, a black female rhinoceros was loaned to São Paulo from Rio de Janeiro to celebrate the opening of the São Paulo Zoo. The beloved rhino’s name was Cacareco, which translates as “rubbish” or “garbage.” And the voters thought it would be funny to use Cacareco as a write-in candidate to protest her corrupt human counterparts, proclaiming the phrase, quote, “better to vote for a rhino than an ass,” end quote. Townspeople printed out ballots with Cacareco’s name on it, confident that they were sending a humorous yet decisive message to the human men on the ballot.
But then something happened. The rhino won in a goddamn landslide. Over one hundred thousand voters, not following the “you know, as a goof” idea, actually voted for the rhinoceros, who came in first place, with the New York Times reporting that Cacareco had received one of the highest totals for a local candidate in Brazil history. And while the animal’s election was ultimately nullified, it sent shockwaves across the country, with many of the candidates leaving Brazil out of humiliation. One was even hospitalized after attempting suicide out of shame. And the ripples reached as far as America, with the U.S. government growing fearful that the Brazilian people might be on the verge of an all-out revolt and pitching in to clamp down on further corruption.
And what of the office-winning rhinoceros? Well, she moved back to Rio de Janeiro later that year, and although she died of natural causes a few years later, her legacy lives on. In fact, the term voto Cacareco is still used today as a powerful protest symbol throughout South America. Of course, Cacareco wasn’t the first animal voted into office in Brazil. That would have been a goat named Smelly, who was elected to the City Council of Jaboatão in 1954. But this is the last episode of the season, so that story will have to wait. Until then, voto Cacareco.
Wanna protest your personal lack of members-only content? Then write in candidates Uncle Pete and Tommy Magoo at allthefeelings.fun and become a feeling friend today. Sure, it’s the last episode of the season, but that’s a perfect time to navigate the political podcast waters. You’ll get access to all the special members-only content that other feeling frienders have been enjoying all season long. And you’ll be voting to hear our series of special recordings we’ll be making in the off-season and releasing just to them. Please know that every subscription vote counts and helps Pete and I continue to do this show we love so very much. It is our passion, but it’s not free to make, so help keep us in office by sending your ballot to allthefeelings.fun and becoming a feeling friend today. We’ll see you at the polls. And now, back to the show.
Pete Wright:
“Autumn” by John Hanson. And yet, even the trees need a season to unleash themselves, like drunks on the way home towards the oblivion of sleep.
Announcer:
Subset two. Seasonal stuff and bins and pumpkin spice.
Pete Wright:
Tom, I landed on seasonal stuff. That’s a really weird category. It’s a little broad.
Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Little broad. I guess we should start by talking about— do you have any seasonal rituals yourself?
Tommy Metz III:
Yes, around every— I think that every time I say the word “harrowing” or “pandemic,” everyone should drink. And now we just lost our entire fan base to alcoholism. During the pandemic, I made a concerted effort to put up a small tree on my kitchen table that I can see from my entire apartment, dress it up, and I put it there around—
Pete Wright:
Okay.
Tommy Metz III:
Oh, I had left it up from the Christmas before and then throughout the pandemic I kept it up. And so I’ve usually been keeping up my tree for about, like, eight months out of the year, and then I put it away and then I bring it right back. That’s pretty much it as far as doing things to my apartment.
Pete Wright:
Okay. So seasonally biennial. You just have the two seasons pretty much. The it’s-tree season and not-tree season.
Tommy Metz III:
Correct. Correct. I’m seasonally bi-curious. Correct.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
What? Yeah.
Pete Wright:
I just got into this thinking about why seasons used to feel so important to me as a human being and have become less so over time.
Tommy Metz III:
Hmm, sure.
Pete Wright:
And it all starts with something that I feel like you and I know personally from years ago, which is— I don’t know, the trapper keeper season, right? It’s the you know the seasons changing when fall starts and someone hands you a school supply list.
Tommy Metz III:
Right.
Pete Wright:
And you know that change is imminent, right? Suddenly your entire life, and by extension the lives of your parents and the lives of teachers and the lives of everybody, falls in line around school, around a school schedule. Communities align around school schedules. Business hours, recreation centers, they align around the availability of people that you can be traced back to school schedules at some point or another, right?
Tommy Metz III:
Huh. Yeah. I don’t think I ever made that connection, but that makes a lot of sense.
Pete Wright:
Right. And I will just say as a note, yesterday my son turned twenty, and that means I no longer have teenagers in my house, right?
Tommy Metz III:
Happy birthday. Oh, right.
Pete Wright:
It’s weird that it shouldn’t seem like a huge deal, right? It’s just another day, and yet it kinda does, right? It’s just another season of life. You know, as an adult, seasons just hit you. Fall arrives. You’re in a grocery store in September and suddenly there’s like a cinnamon broom and you realize people have mums. Mums, Tom.
Tommy Metz III:
What?
Pete Wright:
Do you know what a mum is?
Tommy Metz III:
No, like are you trying to say ma’am?
Pete Wright:
It’s— no, mums.
Tommy Metz III:
Oh.
Pete Wright:
Chrysanthemums. When did people start referring to chrysanthemums as mums?
Tommy Metz III:
I did not know they did.
Pete Wright:
That’s the thing now. The fall flower is the mum, and it is an indicator that you as a human being apparently need a strategy for your mums.
Tommy Metz III:
Wow. The Mum Time.
Pete Wright:
I don’t know when that happened. I was never invited to it, but it is a sign that fall arrives. It is a sign that change is happening.
Tommy Metz III:
It is interesting that— real quick, that you bring up grocery stores, because they are like a time machine. They are always in the future.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
So far in the future. Like, I start—
Pete Wright:
Yes. Entire seasons in the future.
Tommy Metz III:
Yes. Like they just put away the Halloween candy and then it’s here comes Santa Claus. Like, it’s just always— it’s just filling me. Like I feel like time is moving so much faster at Ralph’s.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. Right.
Tommy Metz III:
Okay.
Pete Wright:
There is— so this all reflects on the shadow calendar that nobody ever gave you. And for homeowners, and I know that’s why you saddled me with talking about seasons, homeowners have the shadow calendar writ large.
Tommy Metz III:
Okay.
Pete Wright:
Because there’s gutter season, you gotta clean your gutters. There’s furnace filters, you gotta change those quarterly, right? If you’re doing it right. Some people never—
Tommy Metz III:
All right.
Pete Wright:
There’s some people— this is another subculture that I don’t find myself in, but I know it exists— the closet swap people. People who put away their winter clothes and bring out their summer clothes.
Tommy Metz III:
Closet swap. Oh. That’s right, because you have to— you have seasons. Weird. We don’t have seasons. We have daytime and nighttime.
Pete Wright:
Right. We just have real clothes and then rain gear.
Tommy Metz III:
Got it, right?
Pete Wright:
That’s all it is. Well, I mean, we’re both from Colorado. There is a salt season. You gotta take care of your walks.
Tommy Metz III:
Sure. Yep.
Pete Wright:
You’ve got to close things down. Like, you probably don’t have the hose bleed season.
Tommy Metz III:
I don’t think we have hoses.
Pete Wright:
Things— there’s a drought going on.
Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
They took away all the hoses in the reaping.
Tommy Metz III:
Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah.
Pete Wright:
We have to bleed our hoses or the pipes will freeze, right? That’s a whole— that’s another part of the triggering of season change. And then of course there is the creeping dread of realizing that your neighbor’s yard looks seasonal and yours looks like a place where somebody might live. Right? My next door neighbor, delightfully— I don’t think he listens to the show.
Tommy Metz III:
Mm-hmm.
Pete Wright:
If he does, you know who you are. How’s it going? I love your trees. Yard is impeccable. When Halloween comes, they’re very seasonal people and I love them because they do decorate the whole neighborhood. But they have a life-size skeleton, as people do, and they put it on a palm tree that is in their yard, and it just looks like an excited dog on a leg. It just doesn’t look scary. It doesn’t look seasonally like fall season.
Tommy Metz III:
Oh I see.
Pete Wright:
It looks like it’s humping the tree.
Tommy Metz III:
Sure. Yeah. It sounds pretty sexy, yeah.
Pete Wright:
It’s pretty sexy. So there is that. At some point, without signing anything, we became people who owned bins. Are you a bin person? Do you have bins?
Tommy Metz III:
Like for the apartment building? Yeah, I mentioned bins in my segment.
Pete Wright:
No, no, no.
Tommy Metz III:
We got three blue ones, baby.
Pete Wright:
Oh, Tom, sweet, sweet, ignorant Tom. I mean bins with lids that are for storing seasonal change activities that you put in your closet and pull out for the season.
Tommy Metz III:
Oh, wait. Oh no. My apologies, Pete. I can only apologize. I have one bin, and guess what’s in it? All of that Christmas nonsense that I mentioned.
Pete Wright:
All of that pretty much.
Tommy Metz III:
A tiny tree, a bunch of lights that don’t work, and, like, really old Christmas cards, because I’m afraid that people will stop sending me cards and I don’t want it to look like I have no friends.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
So yeah, I have one bin, just one.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. We have a number of bins. My wife— she has bins for seasonal clothes. She’s a clothes swapper. I don’t want to be a person with so many clothes that I have to swap them seasonally.
Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
It’s got to all fit in one place, so I struggle with that. But our holiday bins are worth reckoning. They’re in the attic above the cars and there is a time—
Tommy Metz III:
Because you’re decorating a house.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
See, I’m just decorating a very small tree. My stuff is just single binny.
Pete Wright:
Oh no, we’ve got multiple bins, we’ve got lots of lights, so many lights. And a lot of it is just stuff you inherit over the years. You know, parents downsize and they just ship you boxes of stuff that you didn’t ask for. And that becomes part of the seasonal, the great seasonal pretend, that— I say pretend because I’m not a pumpkin spice person, and I can’t authentically say that I’m excited every— now what is it, August?— when pumpkin spice season starts. Sweater weather for us is not an identity, but they are very much a staple to seasonal profiles. So, all right, let’s talk then about some of the emotional whiplash that goes on with seasonal—
Tommy Metz III:
But if we see what they could be—
Pete Wright:
Every season comes with this sort of mandatory emotional curriculum and people kind of get into it. Fall demands cozy reflection and gratitude, right? Winter demands joy and togetherness and hygge and gratitude and introspection, and simultaneously it’s dark, so do it at four in the afternoon. Spring demands optimism, and summer demands fun, which is the most exhausting of all of the great demands, because fun is a thing that you have to perform well or it doesn’t count.
Tommy Metz III:
Yep.
Pete Wright:
So, I’ll tell you that according to the 2025 APA Healthy Minds poll, 41% of U.S. adults anticipate more holiday-related stress this year than the previous year. The highest recorded level in recent history, up dramatically from 28% in 2024, 29% in 2023. It is the thing that we are supposed to collectively enjoy getting measurably harder to enjoy. People are feeling angst about seasonal change.
Tommy Metz III:
Why? Because of the expectation put on us?
Pete Wright:
Yeah, exactly. And here’s the banger though, real quick: 89% of Gen Z report attending holiday gatherings solely because they feel obligated to do so.
Tommy Metz III:
Okay.
Pete Wright:
Nearly nine in ten adults going to events they don’t want to be at, performing a season they did not sign up for.
Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
The great seasonal pretend has metrics.
Tommy Metz III:
Wow. Well, that reminds me of one of the— I guess I’ve never thought about it being a season, but if we’re going that way, yeah, it can be a seasonal train that I got off when I saw some of my friends or wives of my friends panicking over New Year’s Eve about not being at the biggest party, the best thing.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
“What are we gonna do? We’re not at the bar yet.” There was so much. And I kind of birthdated it in the way— it’s like, it’s just a day. I get it. I’ll do something, but it’s just— let’s play a game.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
Let’s not worry about any of that stuff.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. So you’re not much of a resolutions guy.
Tommy Metz III:
So yeah.
Pete Wright:
We’ve talked about this on the show.
Tommy Metz III:
Correct, correct.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, me neither. Not into resolutions so much.
Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
That is another marker of a new season, right? The new year, the new transcendence.
Tommy Metz III:
Yeah, I look at myself in the mirror every year and I go, “Uh, let’s lose weight.” And then I kind of wink and I give myself a mirror high five and I just go on with my life.
Pete Wright:
All right. So the anxiety that we feel— this vague dread, right, that’s always there that we’re falling behind some invisible seasonal curricula— this is not new. It is actually, as you might expect, Tom, ancient. This anxiety is ancient and it is—
Tommy Metz III:
Oh, interesting. Okay.
Pete Wright:
Written in our biology. A 2025 University of Michigan study confirmed that human circadian rhythms exhibit seasonal dependence.
Tommy Metz III:
Mm, explain.
Pete Wright:
Just let that sink in. Your internal clock is tracking seasons whether you want it to or not. So, a study author, Ruby Kim, says humans really are seasonal, even though we might not want to admit it in the modern context. Day length, the amount of sunlight we get, it really influences our physiology. It always has, as long as humanity has been humanity. Brain physiology has been at work for millions of years trying to track dusk and dawn. Then industrialization comes along in the blink of evolution’s eye. And right now we’re still trying to catch up. Thank you, University of Michigan.
So your body spent millions of years becoming a seasonal instrument. Industrialization happens, and it shows up, like, you know, on the infinite timescale about ten minutes ago.
Tommy Metz III:
Uh-huh. Right.
Pete Wright:
And said, “Stop doing that. We have lights now and we have Q4 targets and some graphs, and you just need to be ready for all of that.” And pumpkin spice. None of that is written into our biology. It’s 100% artificial, and that creates conflict inside of us, in our brains and in our bodies.
Tommy Metz III:
Okay.
Pete Wright:
And it is not natural, all of the stuff that we sort of force on ourselves as seasons change.
Tommy Metz III:
I guess. Yeah, I bet. I mean—
Pete Wright:
Okay. Genome.gov. It’s genetic, man. As humans migrated out of Africa to different latitudes, we evolved genetic adaptations to seasonal variation in daylight. There is evidence for natural selection at 84 genes that regulate circadian rhythm and sleep. You have in your actual DNA 84 genes whose job it is to care what season it is at any given time. And the weak will die depending on location and season.
Tommy Metz III:
The weak people—
Pete Wright:
Darwin, man. I mean, evolutionarily speaking.
Tommy Metz III:
Sure, sure.
Pete Wright:
Not like, you know, Bob in Bozeman. I’m just saying, right. But you know what I mean. There is a sort of reputation of hardy stock in certain places. Like, people whose people come from the icy cold or the frying hot locales are a different kind of people.
Tommy Metz III:
Sure. Right.
Pete Wright:
I’m not those people.
Tommy Metz III:
Yeah. They’re a little leathery emotionally, or gross.
Pete Wright:
I need it soggy. Yeah. Eight hours of continuous sleep, we’ve talked about this before, is a modern invention. Humans historically slept in two segments with a calm waking interval in the middle. A 2017 study of a Madagascan agricultural community without electricity found people still mostly slept in two segments, rising around midnight. We literally used to sleep differently depending on the season.
Tommy Metz III:
Wow.
Pete Wright:
So all of this just reminds me how much of modern adulting is a performance trap, right?
Tommy Metz III:
Right.
Pete Wright:
Your body is, like, running this ancient seasonal firmware and it still thinks winter is coming in the “do something or die” sense.
Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Right? This is something we’ve been talking about for years, about the tricks that evolution and ancient history plays on our modern brains.
Tommy Metz III:
Right.
Pete Wright:
And modern life has outsourced all of the actual survival part, and they’ve done it with, like, grocery stores and heated buildings and Instacart. And the urgency never went away in our evolutionary mind. So where does that put you? Does understanding that change the way you want to live your life depending on what season it is? It is now— you know, we’re in the April, May range. What are you gonna do with yourself today?
Tommy Metz III:
Well, I like that our entire world and the world that we’ve built is the grocery store telling me what season it is way before it is, that we’re being controlled. That our insides are not matching with the outside. That makes a ton of sense in that kind of push-pull. Because— I mean, it’s just, is it all related to work and consumerism?
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
Yeah, that’s the new patterns that we’ve put.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. It absolutely is. Industrialization. Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
It makes me want to rebel.
Pete Wright:
That’s what it is. Kinda, right? So the stats are interesting. The financial data from the American Psychiatric Association again— 46% of adults worry about affording holiday gifts, 48% are worried about missing someone or grieving a loss during the holidays. All of this stuff is deeply rooted in the conflict that exists between what our instincts, our bodies and brains want to do, and what industrialization and modernity tells us to do.
Tommy Metz III:
Right. Yeah.
Pete Wright:
So it’s almost like the anxiety is a ghost, right? It’s a reflection of who we used to be. Because none of this stuff is the point. The mums. The mums. They’re not the point. Right? Your holiday wreath isn’t the point, your throw pillow rotation is not the point.
Tommy Metz III:
Yeah, uh-huh.
Pete Wright:
The ritual of marking time is the point. It’s what our ancestors were actually doing when they built their harvest festivals and their midsummers. They were marking time and winter solstice rites and spring planting ceremonies. They’re just trying to digest the passage of time together as a community, so no one had to do it alone. And what we do now is so attentive to this shadow calendar. They’re just modern shapes to this ancient impulse.
Tommy Metz III:
Sure.
Pete Wright:
And it’s not a failure. It’s not even really a translation. It’s an okay thing that our instincts might have been hijacked by Target and a merchandising calendar. It still represents a real drive for us as human beings to mark the passage of time together.
Tommy Metz III:
Well, one of the things that maybe can help, but maybe not, is— also marking the passage of time gives you a sense, or it’s supposed to give you a sense of control over something that is beyond your control, that you are taking control of these segments and putting ritual to it.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
But we have to then realize that we have been taken over, that our rituals are being forced on us. So if there’s a way to try to put it back where it was, that would be ideal. But of course, easier said.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. Well, because— you know, maybe it’s easy to say and do, right? Maybe it’s easy to say, look, I’m a seasonal creature and I’ve been handed this monetized capitalist seasonal world and I’ve just been told to make it work. But the truth is, the fact that I’m still feeling anything at all as seasons pass is proof that something is still working.
Tommy Metz III:
Mm-hmm.
Pete Wright:
Something is still working that I’ve inherited from, you know, eons ago. And that actually feels pretty good. And it makes me look forward to ends of things. Not in mourning, but in the form of change and watching what closing doors allow to open in front of me.
Tommy Metz III:
Right, in passing transitions. Yeah. If we honor this— but I think that we should also take some control back, because there’s one thing that I think is the dumbest thing in the entire world. And it’s how close Thanksgiving and Christmas are to each other.
Pete Wright:
Oh. Oh, yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
They’re two of our biggest things in the entire world, and they’re right next to each other.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
And when you’re in Christmas, you’re like, “Hey, well, how have you been for the last two weeks?” Damn.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
Let’s move that. Let’s switch Thanksgiving with June.
Pete Wright:
It needs to be a June thing.
Tommy Metz III:
The entire month of June. June is now—
Pete Wright:
Thanksgiving month.
Tommy Metz III:
June comes between. Yeah, 11 is now June.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
And all of what June was was Christmas. It’s a month long. This is working. I’m feeling rejuvenated.
Pete Wright:
I think we’ve got it. We are going to market a new calendar, the Still Adulting calendar, and it’s going to have some long overdue changes.
Tommy Metz III:
Yeah. Yep. Yes, we’re gonna get to it, and unfortunately it’s going to be made primarily of plastic.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
So once that enzyme happens, we’re all gonna be keeping calendarless for the rest.
Pete Wright:
Yep.
Tommy Metz III:
And then chaos reigns!
Pete Wright:
Thank you all so much for joining us for this last episode of Season 11. This week’s tune is “Junk City” by Luke Kelly. Tommy, what are we doing next?
Tommy Metz III:
I think it’s confident that we’re coming back.
Pete Wright:
Yes.
Tommy Metz III:
We can’t get enough of you guys. It’s a real Brokeback Mountain situation.
Pete Wright:
No program.
Tommy Metz III:
We wish we could quit you, but we cannot. We’re going to be back in another season.
Pete Wright:
I have— ready?
Tommy Metz III:
I have an idea already, Pete.
Pete Wright:
Already?
Tommy Metz III:
Already for the entire season.
Pete Wright:
Okay. Pitch it. Let’s go to the design shop. We’ll figure it out.
Tommy Metz III:
Every episode is about trash and recycling. I can’t get enough.
Pete Wright:
We’re playing a long game with trash.
Tommy Metz III:
Yeah. It’s just going to be All the Feelings Presents Content.
Pete Wright:
Oh, they’re really covered.
Tommy Metz III:
That’ll be it. Thank you all so much for joining us, Feeling Friends, free feed fans, everybody.
Pete Wright:
Everybody, we love it.
Tommy Metz III:
We love this show. Thank you so much for tuning in, asking questions, keeping us honest. And we look forward to— if you are a Feeling Friend, you will have some special bonus episodes coming your way during our long winter’s nap. There’ll be some games, there’ll be all sorts of things happening. Is there anything you want to say to the fine people, Pete, as we put this to bed?
Pete Wright:
I just want to echo what you said. Thank you so much for being here, being a part of the show all 11 seasons so far. We can’t wait for Season 12. Until then, I’m Pete Wright.
Tommy Metz III:
And I’m Tommy Metz III. Thank you so much for joining us this entire season.
Pete Wright:
Thank you so much for joining us this entire season.
Tommy Metz III:
We’ll be back next season with All the Feelings Presents something.
