Summer is here. Finally. And like every summer, the warm days invite us to go outside, to be together, to live. But the truly extraordinary thing this season brings is not the sun, not the sea, not the evenings spent with friends. It is the concrete, real, unmissable opportunity to gather, pile up and sweat in the middle of enormous crowds of perfect strangers, all united around whatever event happens to be taking place.
Today there is no point asking yourself what kind of event is it. You just go. With the calm awareness that the endless queues, the time spent waiting under an unforgiving sun, the food and drinks priced at a level that reflects how much you are willing to invest in your own happiness, and the photos you will post — all of these things, together, build an experience worth every cent spent and every hour lost.
FOMO is our compass. If everyone is going, I have to be there too. If everyone looks happy and ready to celebrate, I put on my Happy Face, plant myself in the middle of the crowd and dance. The mass of bodies moving around me is not an obstacle: it is the context. It is the natural habitat of the modern obsumer.
Sure, the venue can sometimes be hard to reach. Actually, it often is. But that is precisely the moment, when you spend an hour driving in circles looking for an inconvenient, half-collapsed parking spot, that the experience takes on its most authentic flavour. You have earned your access. You have deserved to be there.
After another couple of hours, you are finally inside. Your friends are already drunk. Magnificent. Being thirty and spending your Saturday as an unpaid babysitter for fully grown adults is exactly the kind of human warmth that summer knows how to deliver. Meanwhile, hunger has arrived. An anonymous burger at a gold-plated price sounds perfect. There is just a queue to get through. Not that long. Almost.
But here is the point. The real experience is not the fun, not the dancing, not the music. The experience is the waiting. The waiting is the fun. While you wait, your brain starts working — and scrolling through your phone is not enough to stop it. So you think. You think about how incredible this event is going to be. You think about the friendships that will be born. You think about the engagement your posts will get. The real event unfolds right there, in that mental meta-space where you build the most beautiful version of what is happening around you.
This is why I am here.