Not Bummer Summer

adjusting to work and embracing whimsy

Jun 26, 2025

As a child, my greatest fear was employment. It's not that I wanted to freeload off my parents forever, but every adult I knew with a job seemed miserable. Weary-eyed, in a perpetual state of back pain or headache, and always too tired to sit through one of my dramatic retellings of the day's elementary school drama.

The only time I ever saw flickers of unadulterated joy in the adults I so desperately feared becoming was in the hours leading up to a Friday afternoon. A little warm, pinkish glow flushed on faces that were otherwise grey and sallow as early as Thursday night. Maybe it was the thrill of rushing home, unbuckling their belts, cracking open a crisp, cold Coors Light, and finally watching that DVR recording they'd been too exhausted to enjoy all week. Or maybe it was just the relief of not working for the next two days.

Whatever it was, I knew that I didn't want to wait for almost Friday to have be happy. I wanted to have fun every day—draw, catch bugs with the neighbor kids, read my books, and write my stories—so I decided at six years old that I wanted no part in this whole "having a job" nonsense.

you will grow up to be everything you once feared

Now, I've been employed in some capacity for the past seven years. My childlike wonder got snuffed out earlier than it does for most people (you can read more about that here). But all my past jobs were just ways I made money. I wasn't going to be a career barista, library assistant, or tutor. They were temporary, which meant the inconvenience was temporary, too.

Now, here I am, at my internship, an initial foray into the rest of my life as a career woman. I've traded in my days of scrubbing toilets, washing dishes, and getting yelled at by customers for spreadsheets, slide decks, and shareholder value. And I get a real paycheck! What a dream.

But after two weeks the ennui quickly set in, and I realized I am still six years old and fundamentally frightened by the idea of contributing to the economy by working a corporate job (it's not the job itself—I am very grateful I have it in this economy, and formatting PowerPoints can be quite thrilling if you let it be) but rather the knowing that this will be my routine in some capacity for years. No matter where I work or how exciting those eight hours are, I'll be fundamentally drained by the same grind of Zoom calls and Excel until I make it big as a writer/entrepreneur who makes her own schedule.

My days consist of waking up at 5 am incredibly upset at the world and every decision in my life has led me to wake up at 5 in the morning to join a 6 am Zoom call (I work on East Coast time). Then I get ready for work, work. Then I waste away napping and scrolling on my phone, where between AI-generated gorilla videos and discourse over whether [pop star] is a good feminist, I learn that the US is bombing the Middle East again. And then I get hungry, so I eventually get up and eat a meal resembling a slop bowl for a medieval peasant, sleep, wake up, and do it all over again

After two weeks of behaving like a crotchety middle manager living alone in a one-bedroom post-divorce after my ex-wife took the kids, the house, and all my friends, I decided it was time to get a grip and return to my elementary school sensibilities (after all, this was the last time I remembered the US being at war in the Middle East).

When I was in first grade, my favorite book was Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer. In the book, my literary icon Judy Moody has the most awesome summer plans with her best friends until they all jet off on exotic adventures, leaving her stuck with her annoying brother, second-best friend, and quirky, mysterious aunt.

Currently, I'm in a similar position. My friends are all far away in the world, embarking on their own exciting adventures, and I'm stuck in the same place, making PowerPoints and watching Instagram reels. But as with all good books (spoiler alert), after a summer of Bigfoot hunting and chasing ice cream trucks, she discovers that you can always make the best of what you have.

So last week, I decided I had two options for the rest of my summer: I could either continue to live like a miserable divorced dad who exclusively listens to Nickelback, drinks warm beer, and tells anyone who'll listen about how Karen took everything and is getting with the personal trainer she swore was just a friend, or I could take a page out of one of my favorite books and live like a six-year-old.

In life you only get two choices. Divorced dad or six year old. Choose wisely.

Also I love Nickelback.

The last time I had to wake up extremely early and sit in the same room for eight hours a day was in elementary school. Because I was a child and my mom was a good parent, she had many rules to ensure I turned into a well-adjusted adult: no TV or screens during the week, limited to two hours on weekends. Every time I wanted to use the internet—usually to watch music videos—I had to use the family desktop computer. I had to go to sleep at 9:30 pm on weekdays, 11 on weekends. Other than that, once I came home from school I could do whatever I wanted as long as I was self-contained.

Lo and behold, following my mom's schedules and rules actually yields good results. Because I have to be awake so early just like when I was a kid, I now read before bed every night and swiftly turn the lights off at 9:30 pm. And when I have such limited free time in my day, limiting the time I spend watching Instagram reels and relegating my trashy reality television watching to weekends is measurably good for me. Crazy how that works. (I still feel like I am not old enough to watch Too Hot to Handle)

Back then I believed all employed adults were boring and sad, and at twenty-one, I know that being capital-B Boring is a choice, not a condition of adulthood.

pictures I took all in one day, I love California

Being an employed adult is actually awesome if I let it be. I have the free will to do whatever I want and the adult paycheck to fund it. I also finally have the necessary fine-motor skills to bake cookies without making a mess and my mom yelling at me. There is actually nobody to tell me what to do after I clock out of work. And not even in my most delusional fantasy could I have imagined myself getting to be an adult in sunny Southern California, the place all those rockstars wrote all of those songs about.

I have more agency than I ever did growing up. When I was a kid, my mom wouldn’t play my radio loudly in the mornings or after 9 pm. And she didn't let me drink coffee because she said it would stunt my growth. And she said I couldn’t play the guitar because I already played the violin and I never practiced my violin. And she never made pancakes because my lame brother refused to eat them. At the time these all felt like great injustices, but now I can do whatever I want!

So now I wake up in the morning and blast music as loudly as I can because nobody can stop me. I'm not getting any taller, so I drink two cups of coffee while I toil away at my spreadsheets. And after eight hours I clock out, and I have milk and cookies and I play the guitar until my fingers hurt then I do arts and crafts and I write and I eat vegetables with my own free will and I go to sleep excited to do whatever I want tomorrow.

And on weekends I've been making the effort to see more of Southern California while I am still here. It's so easy to complain about LA, but it truly is a special place to be.

Of course, mustering the energy to do these things is incredibly difficult. My natural urge after clocking out is to sleep until 6 pm, and while it feels good in the moment, afterwards I feel more tired than I was before and gut-wrenchingly guilty that I wasted yet another day of a precious, fleeting summer.

Once I graduate, the seasons will still change and the time will still pass, but there will be no more "summer." The time passes all the same, but somehow every year feels shorter than the last and I always miss where I was even when I believed myself to be miserable.

Whether or not I become a weary-eyed adult or maintain my wonder and joy is a choice I get to make, and I'm glad I'm having a hard time with it now so I don't spend the rest of my life looking back on college like a washed-up frat boy at forty-five telling his much younger coworkers how many beers he could shotgun in his glory days.

I hope you enjoyed this fun little essay. I have been spending more time writing researched essay recently, which you can find here.

On Peter Thiel

About Record Collecting

Here is my short list of things you can do to maximize whimsy this summer. I would love to hear your ideas as well!