The case against summer

Close your eyes and think of the word “summer.” What comes to mind?

Is it long days at the beach, a drink in one hand and a book in the other, letting the sun fall on your face and the waves tickle your toes? Two weeks of vacation in some remote destination, piling up memories to keep yourself warm through the rest of the year? The endless freedom you remember in those July and August weeks of childhood, set loose from the confines of the classroom? Hot dogs and ice cream and roller coasters and ballgames? John Travolta’s falsetto at the end of “Summer Love”?

Well, I have bad news for you, my friend. You are yet another victim of the summer industrial complex, that travel industry-concocted collection of lies designed to convince you that June, July, and August are the three best months of the year.

The beach? That sun will literally kill you. Vacation? Just don’t look up how much plane tickets cost, and don’t even think of leaving the country with the way the dollar is dropping. Freedom? Unless you are an actual child, a schoolteacher, or an NBA player, you’re going to spend most of your time in summer working as hard as you do the rest of the year.

Hot dogs are honestly the worst way to eat meat. Your ice cream is already ice soup. Roller coasters kill an average of four people per year (you can look it up). If you want to drink beer, you don’t need to sit through a baseball game while doing it. Grease is fine, but its success led to John Travolta one day being allowed to make Battlefield Earth, a film so bad that as of this writing, it has a 3 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Summer is the triumph of hope over experience. Every Memorial Day weekend, we begin our summers full of expectation, sure that this will be the season we create the summer to remember. And every Labor Day weekend, we emerge, sweaty and mosquito-bitten, wondering what precisely happened over the past three months. Then next year we do it all over again, fruitlessly chasing that evanescent summer high — even though deep down inside, you know it’s probably going to be a disappointment, and secretly you’re counting the days until September. If you were able to control those hopes, you might be able to control that disappointment.

But don’t you dare air those feelings out loud. When I suggested this essay to my fellow Vox editors, they reacted as though I were about to commit a war crime on paper. Doesn’t everyone love summer? Isn’t summer the best? How dare you look askance at the gift that is the three months when our hemisphere happens to be titled toward the rays of our life-giving sun? What kind of monster are you?

As it turns out, I am precisely that kind of monster. So what follows is why this is our most overrated season — and unlike summer itself, which really is getting longer year by year, I’m going to be brief.

You will not be surprised to learn that I don’t like the heat. Maybe it’s genes — my ancestors come from Ireland, a small, charming, rainy island where for most of the year, the sun is little more than a rumor.

I realize this makes me unusual. The US county that has added the most people in recent years is Maricopa, Arizona, home to Phoenix. Phoenix has a lot of things going for it: relatively inexpensive housing, a fairly robust labor market, and a vibrant population of wild parrots, which is absolutely something I knew before researching this article.
Phoenix also has sun — lots and lots of sun. Just look at what they named their NBA team. And with that sun comes unfathomable summer heat. Across the full 2024 calendar year, the city logged a record-breaking 70 days of temperatures over 110 degrees, obliterating the previous record of 55 days set in 2020. It also set a record for the most days straight with temperatures in the triple digits, with an unfathomable 113 days in a row.

Yet every year, apparently tens of thousands of Americans take a look at those numbers and think, “Yes, please, I would like to see if they have any available lots left on the surface of the sun.”

Look, I get it. The tremendous growth of the Sun Belt in recent decades is one big piece of evidence that, if given the choice, most Americans would rather boil than freeze. Or even be slightly cold. And sure, historically cold temperatures have had a bad habit of killing large numbers of human beings. No one in Game of Thrones was warning that “summer is coming.”

But while it’s still true that extreme cold kills significantly more people globally than extreme heat by a large magnitude, heat is catching up. And there’s one thing you can count on with climate change: It will continue to get hotter. Summer — that season you love so much — is where we’re going to feel it.

You may have heard the line: “This could be the coolest summer of the rest of your life”? It’s true! Just to take one example: A study found that by 2053, 107 million people in the US — 13 times as many as today — will be living in an extreme heat belt where they could experience heat indexes above 125 degrees.

So sure, Americans like the heat just like they like summer, though I can’t help wondering if that has to do with the documented connection between extreme heat and cognitive impairment. (Summer! It makes you dumber!) But I doubt you will like it when your body is no longer able to cool itself through sweating and you begin suffering multiple organ failures.

Let’s flip through the major events of autumn. You have your Halloween — everyone loves candy. Thanksgiving — by far the best American holiday, even if we have all collectively decided to eat a bird we wouldn’t otherwise touch the rest of the year. Christmas and Hanukkah — presents and several days off.

Spring has Easter, a festival of renewal and chocolate. Winter has…okay, to be clear, this is an argument against summer, not a defense of winter.

Summer has Memorial Day (cookouts, beaches); Fourth of July (cookouts, beaches, and ooh, a chance to blow off my finger with fireworks); and then two utterly endless months before Labor Day, where we also have cookouts and beaches. And in between, there are just…days.

This is the secret problem with summer. After school has let out and Independence Day has passed, we enter a tepid sea of indistinguishable days, with little to no events to break them up. July 12? July 27? August 13? I challenge you to tell the difference. Time becomes a desert that stretches out to every horizon, without even the false hope of a mirage to break it up. The Catholic Church, which I grew up in, calls the entirety of summer “Ordinary Time” in its liturgical calendar, which always seemed fitting to me. Nothing special, nothing to wait for — just all the Ordinary Time you can take.

And while the calendar is no help, there’s also what I call the collective action problem of summer. Everything slows down and even shuts down, either because people go off on vacation or because they haven’t but almost everyone else has so what’s the point of doing anything. All the big cultural events — the books, the (actually good) movies, most of the good TV — won’t arrive until the fall. (Except The Bear. The Bear is great.) The sports landscape is as barren as your office, and this summer we don’t even have the Olympics.

I’m sure someone will tell me I’m missing the point of summer, when the very formlessness of the days reminds us to slow down and appreciate these moments out of time. Sure, great, whatever. Personally, I can either be hot or I can be bored — not both.

Technically this should be a subcategory of the previous section, but even Auxo, the Greek goddess of summer, would get impatient with August. Why does it have 31 days? Who voted for that? August is the worst parts of summer concentrated and then wrung out over the course of more than four sweaty, sticky weeks. I am positive that I have experienced August days where time begins to move backward.
Slate had it right back in 2008: Let’s get rid of August. We’ve gone to the moon, we’ve mastered the genome, we’ve somehow made Glen Powell a movie star. If we can do all that, we can remove one measly month from the calendar. Or we could, except that August is the month when all motivation goes to die.

I’ve got a great idea. Let’s have most of the country all go on vacation during the same few weeks. And then let’s ensure that those few weeks are set during one of the hottest, muggiest months of the year. What could go wrong (other than ridiculous travel costs, heat stroke amid the capitals of Europe, and the better-than-average chance of getting hit by a tropical storm)?

It’s probably not true that everyone is having more fun than you this summer, all evidence on social media notwithstanding. But it will feel that way.

Let me give you one last piece of advice. If you encounter someone who uses the term “summering” in a sentence, get far, far away. You are dangerously close to getting into a conversation about the best way to clean linen pants.

I realize I’m not going to change a lot of minds here. There’s something deep in our biological clocks that can’t seem to help but welcome the days when the sun stays up past 8 pm and the air temperature reaches equilibrium with our bodies. Add that to the enforced summer love that comes from all the industries that capitalize on this seasonal affliction. We summer haters are few and rarely invited to parties, but at least we see the truth.

The truth is that you might actually enjoy your summer more if you lower your expectations. It’s not the summer of your life — it’s just three months in the middle of the year.

And please, put on some sunscreen. That big thing in the sky really is trying to kill you.

Update, May 26, 9 am ET: This story was originally published on July 8, 2024, and has been updated with new data on heat waves in Phoenix.