Air Conditioning

Air conditioning has been on my mind a lot lately. I resisted using it until last Wednesday evening. On Wednesday I rode with my brother from Crystal Lake to Chicago in a car without AC. By the time I got back I was dripping with sweat, and I decided to go ahead and put in the window unit. Later in the week, when talking with a friend, I mentioned that I’d just put it in. They asked where I’d gotten it from, thinking that I had only recently acquired it. My response was something along the lines of, “oh, it’s just been on my floor, but I had been resisting putting it in because…” Because what? I had some vague sense of ‘I shouldn’t use the AC too early in the year’, but I didn’t really have any sense of where that idea was coming from.

Then today I read this story. It’s not super-informative, and not super-damning, but it did get me thinking again about why exactly it is that using AC all the time isn’t ultimately what I want to do. Do I want to use it some of the time? Yes, I do. Sometimes I come in from outside and just need to cool down. Sometimes if I’m sitting around in my apartment, there’s just nowhere I can be that I’m not sweating, and it makes me pretty unhappy. But taking that all into consideration, and typing from the comfort of my air conditioned back room, here are a few reasons that I don’t want to use my AC:

1. Cabin Fever – I don’t know what this technically refers to. When I hear the phrase ‘cabin fever’, I usually get an image in my mind that’s some sort of cross between ‘Little House on the Prarie’ and ‘The Shining’. When I have my AC on, it makes me reluctant to leave the house (or, since I’m using a window unit: the room). When I don’t leave the house all day, and only leave the room to get food or use the bathroom, it makes me unhappy. I don’t notice it right away. Usually it’s around 4 pm, and I’m wondering why people bother to keep living, and I say to myself, ‘Mark, you haven’t left the house all day, that’s why you’ve suddenly become a pessimist’. If I can muster the motivation, I leave the house and go for a walk. I get sweaty, but I ultimately enjoy it because I’m outside and moving around. On good days I realize that this is going to happen before I start to go crazy, and I get outside preemptively.

2. Adaptation – When it’s been 32 degrees for months, and it finally hits 60, it feels downright hot. People put on their shorts and leave their jackets at home. Leaving the AC in the closet for a few months of 80s may seem like a drag at first, but it makes the 90s seem a lot more bearable.

3. Heating up the city – How do air conditioners work? Magic, as far as I’m concerned. But I do know that the cooler they make my apartment, the hotter they’re making the outside: and it’s not an even trade. If you don’t believe me, try plugging in your AC in a closed room with a thermometer. (OK, you probably shouldn’t try that.) Millions of air conditioners in millions of houses, stores and cars lead to an appreciable amount of heat exhaust coming from cooling ourselves down. That’s something that I want to avoid participating in as much as possible.

Maybe this is a half-baked post, but it all comes down to these same issues that surround ‘trying to be good’. Using AC too much is bad for me as an individual because it leads to me being cooped up too much and being less comfortable in the heat in general. It’s also bad for me to use to much because ultimately it contributes to harm done to others in the form of global (and local) warming. On the other hand, if I don’t leave it running all day and I turn it off when it’s not an unbearable temperature outside, it’s a pretty important part of my happiness on days when it hits 90.