Winter Break, Three Ways

or: Gratitude, Grit, and a Self-Serious Cornish Man

Winter break has almost passed, and like most pauses in the year, it’s revealed what actually holds my attention. I've spent these days of leisure and cheer on three things:

1. Being thankful — with and for my family, in that quiet, non-Instagram way where gratitude looks like shared meals, tolerance, and laughing at our imperfections.

2. Looking for more income — pragmatically, persistently, and without pretending it’s fun.

3. Bingeing Poldark — because sometimes you need cliffs, corsets, and class conflict to keep your brain from spiraling.

On the surface, that third item looks like escapism. But Poldark, the 2015 Masterpiece series now streaming on Netflix, is interesting to me precisely because it doesn’t let you escape for long.

Yes, It’s a Period Drama

Aidan Turner broods mightily as Ross Poldark.

Let me get this out of the way: I do like a good period drama. I also find Poldark a mite self-serious. Ross Poldark broods. A lot. People stare into the middle distance with enormous feelings. There is an abundance of windswept moral intensity.

And yet, I forgive it.

Because there is substance beneath the melodrama.

What Poldark Gets Right

Set in late-18th-century Cornwall, Poldark is ostensibly about love, loyalty, mining, and inheritance. But it’s really about power, specifically who has it, who doesn’t, and how aggressively those lines are enforced.

The show is relentless about class:

• The wealthy landowners who gamble, speculate, and fail upward

• The miners and laborers whose bodies absorb all the risk

• The women navigating survival in a system that treats them as collateral

• The wars that enrich some and hollow out others

  
  

What struck me this time around is how familiar it all feels.

Division as a Tool

One of Poldark’s themes is this: The people at the top are rarely threatened by the people below until those people notice who is actually benefiting.

So what keeps that from happening? Distraction. Division. Manufactured conflict.

In the show, the working class is encouraged to resent each other — the “undeserving poor,” the outsiders, the women who step out of line — while the truly greedy operate behind the scenes with legal documents and polite smiles.

Sound familiar?

Across time, across empires, across economic systems, the pattern repeats: If you can keep people fighting sideways, they won’t look up.

Why This Matters Right Now

Here’s where my winter break items collide.

While I’m:

• grateful for my family,

• worried about money,

• and watching beautifully lit suffering on the Cornish coast,

  
  

I’m also aware that many of us are being quietly trained to blame the wrong things for our exhaustion.

We’re told our neighbors are the problem. Or immigrants. Or teachers. Or parents. Or “people who don’t work hard enough.” Meanwhile, the systems that extract labor, time, health, and hope continue uninterrupted, tidy, legal, and largely unquestioned.

Flame Rating for Poldark: 🔥🔥🔥

Perspective

That’s why I forgive the show its seriousness.

Beyond the gowns and card games and gusts of wind, I find Poldark is successful in defamiliarizing the present by revealing today’s arguments stripped of modern branding.

Watching people starve while being told it’s their own fault. Watching wealth consolidate while being called “progress.” Watching moral outrage carefully aimed away from the source of suffering. None of this is new.

But if a slightly broody Cornish drama helps sharpen my understanding of how greed survives by keeping us apart, I’ll take that perspective, even if it comes with an excess of longing stares and dramatic horseback exits.

Winter break well spent.