Culture Share: Dear Summer

On expanding our fullest lives beyond the summer solstice

Summer in Rio

Before the pandemic, summer was just that – summer. There was no pressure or expectation to bottle up the magic it brings by compressing it into three months. Of course, after leaving university in 2012, free time became more finite due to the demands and responsibilities of adulthood. Now, summer has become a way to flex on our past selves and those around us, each of us competing to show the world that you and I had the best time. Outside of our immediate circles, no one, quite frankly, gives a shit what your summer looked like.

It’s a very Northwestern mindset to try and package the best moments of our lives into three months. The climate in Northern Europe does not help, as we become slaves to the sun and bound by the grey skies that fill most of the year. There’s a rush to curate the perfect summer dump, optimising our lives for the sake of showing everyone else that we can summer harder than your favourite haters. Most people on your feed don’t care, but that doesn’t change the fact that we all get caught up in living for the gram during summer. Never mind that for some, summer doesn’t always bring joy and playfulness.

Play should always be a central theme in our lives, both motive and reason. Why limit that play to just June-August when we can experience it in the depths of winter’s cold breath? There’s a chapter in my forthcoming book, Escaping Babylon: An Intimate History of Black British Music, titled Dear Summer ‘06, where I reminisce and reflect on the summer when I truly felt free and independent. That summer, I had just finished my GCSEs and got my first job working at Nando’s part-time. I blew my first paycheque on an iPod Classic, Air Force Ones and other bullshit I no longer possess. I still remember that summer, and that’s the greatest gift it gave me: memory.

As brands and consumers alike latch onto the latest trend to find meaning and make sense of what summer means, we forget that those months are all about living life to the fullest. But that doesn’t mean we can experience and live full lives in the other nine months that bookend summer. As a writer, I’m inspired by the Bourdains and Baldwins who sought new adventures despite the world around them burning. So what makes me so special that I wouldn’t follow their doctrine?

There’s another side to this, a more agricultural viewpoint that returns us to former ways of living before industrialisation came to rule how we live. Across Northwestern Europe, daily life was dictated by the changing seasons and how the seasonal cycle impacted harvests and the sowing of seeds. The autumn harvest was the last vestige of the commune before both humans and animals alike would hibernate during the cold winter months. Now, as technology rules our lives, pagan summer solstice traditions have been replaced by the grid. I read a great piece by Ted Gioia on how our lives become dictated by the grid when, before industrialisation, the circle was the essence of life. Whether it’s the Yin and Yang, dancing around bonfires, crop circles or the ouroboros, the circle has been replaced by the grid – our phones, the way cities are built and minimalist new builds.

Of course, our framing of summer in 2025 isn’t because we’re cultivating the fruits of labour that we planted in spring. No, we’re trying to define and optimise our summer into carefully curated carousels and dumps on social media, namely Instagram. Last year was the summer of Brat. The summer before was Barbenheimer. This year, it’s LabuLoveIsland. That said, if you’re still watching Love Island in 2025 and you’re over the age of 25, grow the fuck up. However, this summer has felt slightly different; we’re sitting in a liminal space waiting for an explosion – what will come after, we don’t quite know, but it won’t be good. The looming threat of AI, ChatGPT suggesting teenagers kill themselves, the ongoing massacre and destruction of Palestine by Israel and anti-immigrant rhetoric don’t bode well for what’s to come. So much for the Roaring Twenties.

When the future is uncertain for young people who came of age in the pandemic, making sense of the present can sometimes be the only way to understand one’s place in the world. Last week, we had our wellness week here at ON ROAD, and our junior researcher & writer, Meena, says that it felt like summer holidays where there was little to do but finding solace in that boredom was gratifying. It can be unnerving for all of us whose lives are ruled by algorithms and cobalt-powered devices to sit in boredom, but for most of human history, society has had to sit with stillness. Up until the 1950s, there was no TV, but radio and gramophones were the primary forms of in-home entertainment. That encouraged people to spend time with the community or find entertainment outside, whether that was the circus, theatre, dance halls or pantomime. Things have undoubtedly changed since the 1950s and the explosion of mass media in the 1990s.

Summer in the south of France

So, we make sense of the world we live in today through those neatly curated IG dumps but is this how we should be experiencing summer? I’m sure Palestinian children, at least those who are still alive, don’t have the privilege or freedom to curate their summers and hibernate in the following months. For them, worrying about where their next meal will come from under pain of death is their only concern.

When I get my 35mm film developed this week and reflect on my own summer, which was fucking great – I’ll be more mindful of how this is not how life should be experienced. And just because summer in London comes to an end, that does not mean life and living have to. My birthday is in October, then two months later it’s Christmas, a few months after that it will be carnival in Brazil. Then, in May, my book will be published after a five-year wait. I won’t have the time to hibernate because if I don’t live, the world won’t wait for me. It will move on.

This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t rest and take time to reset, that liminal space is arguably more important than ever before in an always-on world but does it need to be memefied content? How is it a reset and hibernation if we’re communicating to the world that we’re unreachable? Do your thousands of followers need to know that? Or is it a case that it’s a symptom of main character syndrome, where we believe that people are thinking about us that much? As with online behavioural patterns and trends, much of this feels very performative.

So live and enjoy the small privileges you have because you don’t want to look back on your best years and regret the time wasted binging another reality show reunion because you were too scared and tired to go outside. And maybe, that is what we can do to show up and protest; to not give into the temptation of reclusing ourselves just because someone you don’t even like posted a meme saying ‘don’t hit me up for the next eight months’. That’s a sad way to live. And it’s the very least we can do to honour those whose lives were taken far too soon in the Middle East, Congo and Sudan. So live, live like there’s no tomorrow because there may very well not be one.