The best way to spend a summer
July 1st, 2024
What is the best way to spend summer?
I’ve brushed this question aside many times, telling myself: “There is no one best way to spend a summer.” But how true is that, really? Is this some aphorism we tell ourselves to cope with uncertainty? To skirt around making absolute statements? Or maybe we’re scared about having opinions on how people (particularly ourselves) should be spending our precious time.
The more I think about the response “There is no one best way to spend a summer,” I can’t help but think that some summers are definitely better spent than others. I can say with confidence that my high school summer spent at UCLA learning what bioengineering was was much more fun and enlightening compared to the summer I had to chug through pages of math workbooks per my parents’ insistence that I avoid letting my brain rot. Despite making a straw man comparison, it still suggests that some summers are better spent than others, right?
If this question makes you nervous, you’re not alone. For those of us who’ve had the privilege of viewing summer as a time of excess hours, it’s our first taste of exercising agency over what we do with our time. The limitless possibilities are simultaneously liberating and outright frightening. Me? Being trusted with that level of responsibility over my time? Being associated with an outcome that I had a large say in? I’m left feeling exposed when I’m hit with the classic: “Whatcha do this summer?” I feel that the judgment of how I spend my time is a direct judgment of my own character.
Without further ado, where do we even begin to measure a summer? Let’s start with a naive response and develop it from there.
Variety
Let’s say the metric of “summertime well spent” is “number of things I’ve done,” which we’ll refer to as “variety.” Posed this way, I’m reminded of Phineas and Ferb, a cartoon I watched growing up. The premise of the show is best summarized by its very own opening song:
There’s a hundred and four days of summer vacation
And school comes along just to end it
So the annual problem for our generation
Is finding a good way to spend it
Like maybe…
The song then goes on to list various bizarre adventures that’d be featured for episodes (building a rocket, fighting a mummy, climbing the Eiffel Tower, etc — just to give you a taste of the show). Clearly, these guys win at the “number of things done” metric. This strategy makes for a great episodic show, but it’s horrible for continuity and world-building.
It’s also worth mentioning the nuance in how “variety” can be counted — what is the atomic building block of how you’re measuring your summer? Is spending all summer to read 50 books 50 different adventures or just 1 conglomerate activity of “reading books.” Is taking the time to improve your culinary skills by cooking various dishes counted as recreating 100 different dishes or exploring 3 different cultures of cuisine? By that same line of reasoning, it can be said that Phineas and Ferb found 104 ways to achieve the same thing over and over again — annoying their older sister Candice.
Let’s set aside the ambiguity of defining the atomic building block of summer and agree that any collection of activities is defined along two distinct axes of quality and quantity. If so, what is the balance to strike between quality and quantity?
Somewhere in the back of my mind, I’m always thinking about the law of diminishing returns. The canonical example given to students learning economic principles for the first time goes as follows:
I gain a certain amount of happiness (utility) after eating my first slice of pizza. The amount of happiness I gain after eating my second slice of pizza is a little less, and the third even less. So on and so forth.
Realistically, you’ll reach a point where marginal utility can become negative (too much of a good thing can be a bad thing). But even before it becomes a bad thing, there’s a hidden cost lurking in the background as you devour your 4th slice of pizza: opportunity cost, the cost of what you give up (stomach space in this case) by eating another slice of pizza instead of a cone of ice cream (let’s ignore nutrition and health implications and just focus on how much joy these foods spark).
Back to our original scenario, instead of slices of pizza, we have slices of time and how we want to spend it. “I’ve spent 4 hours scrolling through Wikipedia. As much as I want to spend the next hour going down the rabbit hole, that hour is probably better spent doing something else, like exercising, catching up with friends, or absolutely anything else.” Many activities do have a diminishing return curve, and some returns taper off faster than others. Let this natural law guide you when you move on to the next activity.
Timeliness
Setting aside “variety,” how about “doing things that can only be uniquely done during these next three months.” Let’s call this “timeliness.” What things can only be done during this window of time of the year (or of your life?). For me in particular, I’ve either been a student or a teacher at any given point in life, so summer is particularly special for being a contiguous block of time when responsibilities are at a minimum. Thus, I find myself traveling to visit National Parks, starting home improvement projects like repainting my room, or starting from scratch with new hobbies like bookbinding.
But with opportune activities tugging at your attention in all directions, we risk neglecting long-term activities that are always available to us. For instance, you know that book will always be waiting for you on your bookshelf. Or that friend you wanted to catch up with is still going to be in town for the next few years anyway. Or that language you said you were going to study and learn is always on Duolingo. It can wait. It can all wait. But how long are you going to put it off in favor of activities that are “urgent”? To what extent will we allow the fear of missing out on opportunities drive our decision-making? While timeliness is a good metric, it pulls your energy into detours that can deviate from the goals you originally set out to do. It makes us reactive instead of proactive.
Enjoyability
Let’s set aside pragmatism for a second. Can’t the focus of summer simply be enjoying it? Can we still come to an answer with generality in all its greatness? As a fresh starting point, let’s say “A summer best spent is one that is spent having fun and being happy.” Do what excites: play video games, go to the beach, read that book, bar hop with friends, catch the summer movies as they’re released. The benefit of the “enjoyability” metric is that it’s adaptable. What’s fun for you one week may not be what’s fun for you another week. Being honest about the shifting tides of fun will grant you the breathing room/flexibility to explore new things and learn more about your own tastes.
How can you possibly argue with this enjoyability metric? If you do beg to differ, what are you — a hedonic pessimist? Yet, even the most optimistic of us can’t help but be suspicious. Something deep inside my soul whispers: “There’s more to life than the pursuit of happiness.” This metric doesn’t capture the full range of our human experience.
But more profoundly, there’s a double danger in thinking that (1) summertime is the only time to have fun and (2) fun is the only thing you can have during summer. It’s not like we should spend the other 9 months of the year minimizing fun and only doing work either, right?
Putting it all together — the strategy and goal
The three “metrics” I explored in the sections above are not exhaustive of all the ways to evaluate a summer. I hope it’s clear that optimizing for one sole metric is not a strategic way to approach summer. In fact, it’s quite silly to select a strategy if you were never clear with your goal to begin with. What are you even trying to achieve in the first place?
Any strategy must be evaluated with respect to a goal.
It makes sense to have different approaches to spending your summer if we have different priorities. In answering “What is the best way to spend a summer,” you must also answer: “What are my goals for this summer and beyond?” If your goal is to just relax and have fun, what difference does “timeliness” have on your decisions? If your goal is to maximize your chances for getting into a program, “enjoyability” can probably wait. I can’t tell you what your goals should and shouldn’t be. To keep this essay focused, let’s assume that you have identified your goals for the summer and perhaps contextualized them with respect to your larger goals in life.
I polled a few of my friends who were entering grad school on what they did before starting: “What did you do the summer before starting grad school and why? How did you feel about it then?”
- One subset of my friends took on “profession-related” opportunities like internships and research positions. They wanted to hit the ground running when they started their programs or get further in their respective fields. Their actual day-to-day experiences varied depending on their working circumstances. Overall, it sounded like they had lukewarm summer experiences.
- Another subset of friends was committed to relaxing and spending time with friends/family. They saw their summer before starting grad school as their last chance to not work, so they took it to recharge from brutal undergraduate workloads and mentally prepare for their next chapter of life.
In terms of the three metrics we explored before, both subsets felt the “timeliness” of “the final summer before grad school” but differed in what they wanted to get out of it, thus leading to different levels of enjoyability and variety.
I then asked them: “How do you feel about it now?”
While it was the case that each of my friends structured their summers around their goals/priorities at the time, how they view their summers now in the present day differs. Most friends who took on work during the summer expressed a tinge of regret, stating, “It could have been better. I could have rested a bit more and tried experiencing something new/different, separate from work-related stuff”. The friends who committed to relaxing still felt like they made the best choice at the time, but perhaps they felt a little bored towards the tail end (nothing wrong with a little boredom though). It’s true: goals should inform your strategy. But up until now, we haven’t accounted for the fact that we change over time, and our goals change too.
The question of “how to best spend a summer” is a moving target. And not just in the obvious way of how different people will have different opinions on how you should spend your time. There’s a subtlety beyond that. Your own opinion of a given summer will evolve. How you think you spent your summer during that period of your life can change a few years down the road thanks to the blessing (or curse?) of hindsight bias. “I enjoyed doing XYZ in the moment, but looking back, I should have done ABC.”
At some point, it feels that we’re acting out of fear and trying to minimize the regret we’d harbor in our future selves. So, allow me to backtrack once again. Instead of constantly changing how we evaluate a given summer through the years, wouldn’t it make more sense to just tell ourselves: “I did what I did with the information I had, the person I was at the time, given the circumstances.” It’s actually the rational thing to evaluate a strategy regardless of the outcome:
Let’s say there was a 90% chance of winning $1,000,000 or a 10% chance of losing $1000; it’s rational to play the game based on your expected earnings are positive, regardless of the outcome. It boils down to how much risk you can take on.
If we could afford that level of understanding of our past selves, why stop there? Why not extend it to how we judge (or not judge) the way others spend their time? After all, you don’t go around ridiculing Kindergarteners for spending their summer doing Kindergarten stuff, do you?
Conclusion
It seems that our original question is falling apart before our very eyes. We’re left with the core, existential question of “how should we spend our lives?” This question has haunted humans ever since we graduated from trying to survive to trying to live. How we grapple with this question is intrinsic to the way we do everything in life. It forms our identity.
I know I shouldn’t end this essay with an unsatisfactory existential question. I’ll leave you with my two cents though: be thoughtful/deliberate about how you spend your time, but there’s no need to overthink it. Heck, why the need to min-max life like an RPG game in the first place and freeze? Analysis paralysis, they call it.
And maybe I posed the question all wrong. Maybe we shouldn’t be thinking about how we “spend” our time so much as how we “live” it.