Life Lessons: How To Be A Lazy Summer Slug
Get the lackadaisical summer you've always dreamed of.
By Izzy Snow
Published
Tips To Save Your Life is a monthly column that offers fearless, silly, and delicious advice for how to survive the mosh pit we call life.
As soon as it gets warm in New York, our favorite haunts start looking like a Where's Waldo scene. Who can blame us for overpacking subway cars? After months of seasonal affective disorder, I want to be a creature of the gutter, slithering into ramshackle garden furniture and sipping my $26 frozen drink until the wire chair imprints a pattern on my legs. With all this burnout, a sunburn doesn't feel like a singe on my skin anymore, but the shedding of my exoskeleton, a wintry layered past self.
On our way to Rockaway Beach, my most extroverted friend recently mentioned that he finds summer exhausting. The sun rises and sets from behind our Slack screens. The free, outside time is a hot commodity, and it comes with a distinct pressure to make today better than yesterday. I blame High School Musical 2 for the unwarranted urgency to be over-productive during the summer. Those singing kids were so excited for summer, but as soon as it started, they were juggling relationships, life crises, toxic friendships, and teaching hot girls how to play golf. They barely had time to sing! At what point does hustle culture become a rat race, or worse, a bunch of ants on a hill? We numbly move from scene to scene, finding fulfillment only in the tasty indulgences we can carry to our colony's center.