You're All Summerpilled: Why It's Actually The Worst Season
To the excitement of Instagram influencers everywhere, we have officially entered summer. Well, not in terms of official equinox-based division, but given that it’s over 100 degrees in some parts of the United States, I think we can bypass the nitpicking. You can expect your social media channels to start to inflate with pictures of patio drinks and toes in beach sand, of the biggest, floppiest, most obnoxious hats you’ve ever seen. If summer was actually made up of just these select moments, it really would seem like a slam-dunk of a season.
These snapshots, though, are made up of only the cherry-picked highlights of a season. For those of us who don’t own a boat, and aren’t regularly comped suites in combination hotel slash wellness centers, there’s a whole lot of summer that, to be frank, sucks. Don’t let the propaganda of Big Beach draw the linen over your eyes and convince you that summer is a carefree, twirling dance through a meadow filled with flowers and spicy margaritas.
If you’re reading this in disbelief, sunglasses propped on your forehead, let me elaborate on 5 reasons that summer is overrated:
Sweat In Summer Is An Unending Physiological Curse
If anyone was to pose the question to me, “would you rather be uncomfortably hot or uncomfortably cold,” I would, without fail, go with an unpleasant chill. That’s because the temperature might be outside of ideal in either situation, but only in one am I uncontrollably, endlessly wet. If my body is truly loving this weather as much as I’m told it should be, why is it working overtime to pump salty waste out of every pore in order to keep my body at a temperature that won’t cause sunstroke?
I understand some people have a better heat tolerance than others. That is a trait I am not blessed with. By heritage, I am Scotch-Irish. My body was built for bogs, not hot pavement. I am at my most comfortable surrounded by a dense fog. I have the same preferred habitat as the Hound of the Baskervilles. So, come summer, I’m not laying out in a pool chair tanning. I am apologizing with my eyes to a Dunkin Donuts cashier as I hoard napkins from their dispenser in an attempt to keep myself dry enough that I don’t ruin most chairs.
You Have To Dress Like A Cuban Uncle Or A Six Year Old
I’ve just covered how unfriendly the heat is to my body’s basic operations. To minimize this, I’m forced to try to find a wardrobe that can keep me from collapsing on the subway platform. Here I have two options, neither of them particularly flattering. First, I can hoard as much seersucker and linen and other breathable fabrics as possible, assembling an outfit that makes me look like I founded Jurassic Park. I just want to get some fresh airflow under my pits and now I look like I’m receiving a shipment of illegal exotic pets at a Miami airstrip.
The other option is to just reduce the amount of fabric by as much as possible. This basically means a whole season of t-shirts and shorts, which is not a great look on any man that doesn’t have the body type of a JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure protagonist. If you eat nothing but grilled chicken, brown rice, and Instagram superfoods, congratulations on being able to join in on the male crop-top trend. If I were to leave the house in a crop top I would make it a block and a half before a group of teenagers called me a clinically depressed Winnie the Pooh.
We Don’t Get Summer Break Anymore, You Still Have To Work
I think part of the reason that summer still holds a disproportionately beloved spot in the minds of the public is from when it was the one part of the year when we didn’t have to go to school. But ask yourself–how much of that was the weather, or anything to do with the actual angle at which the Earth is presenting itself to the Sun, and how much of it was just not having to do homework? Sure, you have treasured memories of throwing up caramel corn at Six Flags with your best friend, but again, that’s just because amusement parks, and caramel corn, rule. Plus, you weren’t paying for any of it.
I posit that in the term Summer Break, Summer gets to naturally piggyback on the joy and strength of the Break. Who doesn’t want a break, at all times? If I get to play Ape Escape for 6 straight hours, that’s a good time, regardless of the outside temperature.
Sunburn, Sunscreen, And Melanoma
Another leak in the argument of “we love this weather” is that this weather actively destroys our skin cells unless we cover them with coconut-scented slime. Especially for people that, like me, are so pale that every nurse we’ve ever had has complimented us on having “easy veins.” It takes some serious effort to get frostbite, a.k.a. reverse sunburn, but come summer, I have to grease myself up like I’m trying to get through a bank’s air vents just so my entire outer layer of skin doesn’t slough off two days later? No thanks.
Not to mention melanoma. The thing where the radiation that makes it a “beach day” damages your cells to the point where a dermatologist has to take out a piece of your back with a melon baller so that it doesn’t straight up kill you. Avoidable, of course, but only if you diligently coat yourself in thick layers of sunscreen every 2 hours. And not the kind that gives you a tan, either. The high-SPF, bone white, mayonnaise-adjacent stuff. Now to enjoy the beach! Just try to ignore the fine coating of sand that’s immediately adhered to your entire body like you’re a freshly sugared churro.
I’m A Sad Little Goblin Man And I Like It In My Cave
The sunlight hurts my eyes and the sounds of the BBQ next door are making it hard to focus on my online Magic: the Gathering drafts.
