Beyond Euro-Summer: The Art of a Simpler Season
By Emilia Pirir
In a time when everyone seems to be chasing the same kind of summer, it’s worth asking what it means to experience the season fully, without the pressure to post about it. We find ourselves in a digital age where social media trends flood our screens with the “perfect” summer getaways; ergo, “Euro-summer.”
Images of traveling along the Amalfi Coast and sunsets falling upon small Italian towns have captured the attention of many who aspire to experience such encounters. Influencers fly off to hidden getaways, documenting corner cafes, tourist-filled streets, and then somehow return home, somehow transformed.
Reborn. Revived.
The linen dress catching the summer breeze as you sip a cold espresso under bougainvillea-draped awnings.
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But reality hits as it always does. When did we reach the point of having normalized our summer lives with those we see influencers engage in? Can everyone truly manage to afford such extraneous summer plans?
We’ve become curators of illusion, collecting moments not for memory, but for metrics—likes, saves, the elusive sense of being seen.
Everyone can, however, afford the richness of taking notice of the smallest things surrounding them.
In a culture of constant documentation and being on the go, there’s something subversive about choosing to be still in one moment. Accepting the simple pleasures of the world.
The simple summer unfolds in the lightest of moments: Lying below an oak tree as the sun’s beams shed through the leaves. How much clearer the words of a song sound through headphones while walking down a quiet neighborhood. Rummaging through undiscovered paths during an evening walk.
After years of seeking external or online validation, experiencing the simple summer asks nothing of you except presence and authenticity.
Allow your mind to spiral, seek, and restore. We shouldn’t always hold ourselves up to the standard of curated perfection.
A “worthy” summer does not need a change in scenery.
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When did we start believing that every experience must be worthy of a story or a post? Some moments are meant to be solitary and true. This way of approaching summer holds space for everything: the beauty, the struggle, and even what might be called the bad. If restoration is to come, it will arrive when we stop chasing those awe-struck moments and instead let this summer be exactly what it is.
As the season unfolds, perhaps we’ll begin to see that the pressure to perform limits us from experiencing the purest acts of all.
