Anyone else wondered why we keep naming our summers like 2020? Four’s universally acknowledged as Brat Summer. 2021 was Hot Girl Summer. 1967 was the summer of love. And yet I can’t think of a single time when we last gave a nickname to a spring or fall season. I mean, it’s not that weird to name time periods. We’ve been doing it with larger chunks of time, the romantic period, the Gilded Age, the Victorian era. When we do this, it’s called periodization and helps us better understand historical pattern and how they’re laying together. But recently, it’s like we’re specifically being drawn to define the feeling of the summer. It’s always what are we wearing this summer? Or did I just write the song of the summer? And this partially happens because summer is simply the season when we spend the most time in public. It’s nice outside, we often have breaks. So it’s a particularly good time to capture and influence the zeitgeist with a specific label. But this is also becoming more common because of our new societal fixation on short term trends. We have this need to label everything that’s been shoved down our throats through fast fashion and the social media cycle, which is causing us to categorize every shorter periods of time. And of course, marketers are very aware of this. Look at the way they tie commonly Harris to an already trending meme for maximum impact. Look at how in 2022, a lot of people were convinced that it was Barbie Summer simply because that was being marketed to them. Corporations are taking advantage of this and it’s affecting you directly.