And yet your neighbor has already hung a pumpkin wreath on her front door like she's trying to personally summon the apocalypse.
Welcome to fall, the only season that starts before it legally exists.
Starbucks drops the pumpkin spice latte in late August, Home Depot becomes a hay maze, and every white woman between 25 and 55 loses the ability to discuss anything else.
Let's be honest about what's actually happening here.
It's a $10 billion industry built entirely on the idea that you're allowed to wear a scarf indoors and call it "cozy." Marketers figured out years ago that if you slap a flannel filter on anything, Americans will pay triple for it and post it on Instagram with a caption about "golden hour." And the leaf-peeping?
Every October, thousands of people drive four hours to Vermont to stare at dying trees.
Nature is literally shutting down and we've rebranded it as romantic.
Here's the part nobody admits out loud: fall is just summer's slow, sad breakup.
The days get shorter, the sun clocks out early, and your seasonal depression starts filing its paperwork.
But we dress it up with cider donuts and hayrides so nobody has to sit with the fact that winter is coming and so is your heating bill.
The pumpkin spice thing is genuinely unhinged if you think about it for ten seconds.
The latte is basically a warm milkshake with a marketing budget, and we treat its annual return like the Second Coming of a very caffeinated Christ.
Fall weather is a 40-degree morning, an 80-degree afternoon, and a personal crisis at 3 p.m. when you're standing in a parking lot wearing a cardigan and sweating through your flannel like you just ran a marathon.
You will also not remove it, because then you have to carry it.
The fall girlies have already bought their boots.
They've already booked the apple orchard.
They will take 400 photos of the same pumpkin and post 12 of them.
If you're gonna gaslight yourself into enjoying the slow death of sunlight, you might as well do it with a cute mug.
The rest of us will be inside, blinds drawn, waiting for the temperature to make up its mind. **The take:** Fall is fine.
But fall is also a marketing psyop that convinced a nation to romanticize shorter days and colder everything in exchange for a cinnamon-flavored beverage.
Final Thoughts
Just don't act surprised when it's dark at 4:45 and you can't feel your fingers.