This Summer Is Gearing Up to Be a Wild Mess. Welcome to Big Brat Summer.

A fun game to play with someone you hate is to ask them how many summers they think they have left in their lives. Thirty? Twenty? Ten? Life is long, but summer is always too brief, a few fleeting months of joy stuck between the drudgery of tax season and the inertia of winter. From childhood to retirement (if you’re under 30, please ask an elder to explain this concept), year after year, we sit in giddy anticipation of June. What is summer if not potential exemplified? The season becomes a potent mix of relief and ferality—a time for dating scurrilously, for spending unscrupulously, for leaving work early on a sunny Thursday to have a drink in the park with your friends. But there’s something different in the air this year, a primal energy, perhaps explained by the past three summers being marred in large part by the pandemic. Already, I—a certified summer-hater, sweat pooling on the tops of my knees somehow—have started saying yes to whatever I’m invited to, from concerts I don’t care about to last-minute vacations where the entire itinerary is just “large wine.” Normally fastidious about my finances, I’m now happy to throw money at any and all problems and desires. I haven’t experienced a good summer in years, after COVID, a divorce, and a sick family member derailed my best-laid plans; if I don’t throw ass on a boat in the Maldives at some point over the next few months, know that my personal circumstances have taken a calamitous turn. In 2019, we were promised Hot Girl Summer. In 2022, finally beginning to emerge from the shadow of the pandemic, it was supposed to be Feral Girl Summer. In 2023, Rat Girl Summer poked its head around a corner and then promptly skittered back behind a dumpster. Now, we’re staring down the barrel of what I hereby declare Big Brat Summer: It’s time to let loose and do what you want, because the world is already over. In 2024, I, like so many of us, feel a little washed and so much older, eager for some hedonism and some revolution. The themes colliding this summer—our fuck-it indulgences, the feeling of being over, a crushing sense of nihilism that has no cure other than, perhaps, dancing in a smoke-filled basement—are perfectly encapsulated by Charli XCX’s new album Brat. It’s already being hailed as a release that speaks to the moment. “Why I wanna buy a gun? Why I wanna shoot myself?” Charli, patron saint of 31-year-old straight women appealing to 21-year-old queers, sings over a synthy beat. We hear a disassociation from grief, even as we can’t escape its pull: “While she’s spinning around on the dance floor she’s also spiraling out in her head,” Rolling Stone wrote in their review of Brat. “[She’s] digging deep into the type of insecurities and fears reserved for the comedown the morning after.” What have we been doing all this time if not trying to outrun that comedown? It’s useful to think of this summer in relation to one that we already lived through, under paradoxically similar but vastly different circumstances. A burgeoning trend has emerged on social media invoking the summer of 2016 in anticipation of the summer of 2024; TikTok in particular is host to countless young people praying for the good vibes of Beyoncé’s Lemonade and the dog Snapchat filter. Viewed through such rose-tinted glasses, the summer of 2016 felt downright idyllic, those few months before we knew what a Trump presidency would feel like. It was years before the pandemic would land full force around the world. That was the year when Drake’s “One Dance” was the song of the summer, your worst friend forced you to listen to the Hamilton soundtrack in her car, and the Cincinnati Zoo killed Harambe. Remember when then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton told everyone to “Pokémon Go to the polls”? We had the time to laugh about that for weeks! Filtered through the cold light of reality, of course the summer of 2016 wasn’t perfect. Only in comparison to this year, this hell year, could it feel good in hindsight. Even in 2016, we were well aware of our daily horrors, between terror attacks, Zika virus, Brexit, police brutality, the Pulse nightclub shooting (among several other mass shootings in the U.S. that year), the never-ending Syrian civil war, and record high temperatures. It was the year Alan Rickman, David Bowie, and Carrie Fisher all died. God, they rebooted Full House. And yet, in the cultural memory shared by so many of us, summer 2016 still stands out—whether through a case of selective amnesia or not—as one of the last good summers. In 2016, we danced because a Trump presidency—and the related and resulting ghastliness—felt too outlandish to be real. We were primed to enjoy our summer because we were arrogant: We didn’t think that our lives could get so bleak, that our governments could be so unfeeling, that our hopes could be shrunken down into pebbles. We summered like we were sure the world wouldn’t end. Now, it’s the inverse, the two summers reflecting each other like some twisted portrait of Dorian Gray: Under the crushing malaise of war, inflation, climate change, political corruption, and sickness, we’re summering like we know it’s already over. But, hey, first we all have to get tortured by another few batshit months at hand, perched as we are on the precipice of another inflection point. Again, we’re in the midst of an election that’ll be won by at least one man born in the same decade as Velcro was invented. Trump, as magazines like the Atlantic are fond of unilaterally declaring, is unlikely to win the next election. But remember when plenty of media outlets and professional opinion-havers got that wrong the first time around? Boy, didn’t that ruin Christmas. These days, protesters are still being met with derision and with violence—just like many of them were in 2016—with pro-Palestine demonstrators beaten, arrested, and leveled with often baseless accusations of antisemitism or vacuousness. Things are only bound to get more extreme as we crawl toward Election Day, as more protesters are bound to organize, and more cops are directed to use force. Meanwhile, Congress has stopped pretending to give a single fuck and is fully leaning into Housewives-level plot twists. Don’t worry, there’s good news: 2024 is on track to be the hottest summer ever, as climate experts and ordinary people continue to beg those in power to do something, anything at all, about our warming oceans and heating planet. And here we are, in a version of reality in which 50 Cent is hanging out with Lauren Boebert at the Capitol. There is a world in which, perhaps, we could have held on to some semblance of the hope—or delusion—that still suffused the summer of 2016. There was more of a belief in the future, in potential, that there was a good reason to build something for later. But, as we learned from the aftermath of the summer of 2020, during which nationwide protests erupted over the police murder of George Floyd, it feels difficult, if not impossible, to cause a lasting sea change. While some were shaken out of complacency by that period, four years later, it feels like the displays of public dissent—those ubiquitous black squares on Instagram—left little impact. (In New York, at least, there’s an uptick in cops on the subway playing Candy Crush.) The radical changes proposed during the pandemic have faded back into the routine of the way we were before, only it feels like something has been irreparably broken. We’re different now; we walked through all these fires together, whether we wanted to or not. And yet, all this demonstrably bad news is freeing, too. Collectively, we have less to fear‍—not because the future isn’t a horror, but because it is, and we’ve already been living through it. We’re sandwiched between a felon running as the presumptive Republican candidate, a Democrat president whose tenure was not able to prevent the degradation of abortion rights, a pandemic that made us lonelier and sicker, and bearing witness to the abject cruelty of ongoing state-sanctioned violence and mass killings. It’s unclear if this is the fall of a republic, or simply the growing pains of a country built largely on the corn syrup industry. Whatever it is, there is comfort in knowing we’re not en route to somewhere worse. We’ve been in the bad place the whole time. So what are we supposed to do in the face of such circumstances? Big Brat Summer calls for doing whatever the fuck you want; tomorrow simply isn’t guaranteed, and even if it were, who’s to say it won’t be a worse day? Why not book that flight, make that irresponsible purchase, enjoy that summertime indulgence? After all, our parents are dying, our kids can’t get off their fucking iPads, and most of us under 35 will likely never own property, will never get to enjoy retirement, and will perhaps suffer from some climate change–related melasma. For decades, we’ve been encouraged to prepare for the future, but future-proofing feels like a privilege afforded to those who aren’t busy fighting for their present. Is it any wonder why so many young people have taken to the streets and shut down their college campuses in protest, risking expulsion or arrest for a worthy cause? When the promise of a stable 9-to-5, complete with background checks and 401(k)s, is no longer a guarantee, there’s not much to stop us from living up to the name that older generations call us when we agitate for change: brat. During Big Brat Summer, we don’t wanna do what we’ve been told. We don’t wanna behave and act right and be nice. The petulance is the point. But Big Brat Summer is about more than just wanton nihilism. We’ve had years of trying the alternative: well-mannered calls for action, calm conversations with “the other side,” town hall debates and uncomfortable family dinners and no more plastic straws because that was the reason the oil company Pemex once set the ocean on fire. Those civil efforts didn’t work. In 2024, we have more perspective than we ever thought possible. Being polite about our demands for progress didn’t give us a better world; it didn’t even give us a particularly good summer. If Big Brat Summer doesn’t force the powers that be to reform the absolute joke that is the Supreme Court, then at least it will mean we can scream at a senator in the morning, smoke a joint in the afternoon, and start a revolution that evening. (There will be dancing; the dress code is “mesh slut.”) Some things stay the same. The sun is still out. There’s still Dua Lipa to bop to, and Drake is still out here pretending to be Jamaican. There are still protests to go to, still besieged by unrestrained cops. The president is still not listening, whichever one he is. It’s still so, so hot outside. My heart is still broken. We still hope, but we know exactly how it’s going to feel if it doesn’t go our way. We’ve been here before. May as well H.A.G.S.