Cold
Spring is more stressful than autumn, but shouldn't be. The urgency to plant and prepare and prune is there, but it's not nearly as time-sensitive as the arrival of the first cold weather, a single-day death sentence for almost everything edible still outdoors.
Are we really going to eat this many tomatillos? (Yes, we could make salsa: but do we really have time?) These small apples with the worms in them which don't taste very good, even without the worms - we're going to bring them inside? Every year I ask myself "why?" - and every year there's a fragrant tub of half-rotten apples by January. The medicinal herbs in the dehydrator - am I really going to make a salve, or this just going to be yet another unidentifiable green powder in a mason jar hiding in a cupboard? It's a 50/50 shot - and that's being generous.
Our ability to prioritize what to rescue is flawed. Acting randomly would probably be better. We'd make horrible lifeboat captains. The decision of what to harvest and preserve is completely subjective and psychological, tied up in our spring-bound hopes of what a particular fruit or vegetable was supposed to be, or what we were excited about, like overbearing parents unable to part ways with our expectations.
But the strange thing is that the sacrifice of produce isn't as woeful as the feeling of a squandered spring. I assume this is because you have the option to store, preserve, ferment, or otherwise utilize something that's already been produced - every decision not to salvage something is effectively conscious, and in a sense the optional value of your work is still there - but spring is different.
I think the reason is that there is no quantifiable limit on our plans for spring. There should be, of course, if we were reasonable - but in the spring all reflectivity and self-awareness go out the window. All sense of memory, all time management skill, all of it escapes us in a frenzy of optimism even when we're still surrounded by the ruins of half-finished projects and ineptly executed ideas. The corpses of last-year's unharvested heirloom pumpkins might still be in the field while we survey the land to repeat more or less the same mistake with something else.
But what happens is that when you do finally force yourself to prioritize your spring planting, there is a part of you that thinks you really could have carved out an extra day here or there to do this, that, or the other thing. There's this "fear of missing out" when it comes to your own potential actions that is far, far worse than the actual waste of your own work at the end of the season, when really it should be the reverse.
I'm sure there's a pair of well-studied cognitive biases capable of explaining this silliness.