It’s getting earlier every year, that first meme about golden leaves and pumpkin-spiced lattes. This year, I swear, I spotted one in early August, while we were still sweltering under our fourth heatwave of the summer.
Because, of course, for those that like crisp mornings, Halloween and glasses of red wine in front of roaring fires, the arrival of autumn brings with it something else: the incessant need to tell everyone just how much they love this perfectly pleasant, if perpetually damp, season.
I call it Big Autumn. The idea that liking autumn is enough to sustain an entire personality. I don’t know when it first happened but my instinct is that it’s been driven by an almost entirely brown-and-orange aesthetic pushed out via Pinterest and Instagram, and not by the often grim realities: grey drizzle, shorter days, the sense of impending Christmas.
It’s not that I have an issue with the season itself. Sure, my partner and I refer to it as “mud season” because we have a spaniel and two young children, and our house won’t feel truly clean again until the end of March. But I’m partial to a roast dinner and a fairy light, I like oversized jumpers and, although I avoid Halloween, I find Bonfire Night quite magical, even if I do always over-layer and end up sweaty and overstimulated.
No, it’s not the season I take issue with but rather our need to define ourselves by our preferences. It’s a trend that has been perpetuated by social media. See also: being a cat person or a boy mum. It smacks of Christian Girl Autumn, a viral meme from 2019 that emerged as an antidote – one in knee-high leather boots and an oversized scarf – to Hot Girl Summer.
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To me, it merely highlights our modern-day compulsion to construct and curate personalities rather than simply inhabit them. It’s as though the internet has encouraged – nay, forced – us to paint ourselves with broad brush strokes rather than with the nuance and intricacy that a human life calls for. It demonstrates a terminal lack of imagination, although perhaps lives spent juggling always-on jobs, constantly popping WhatsApp groups and the astronomical cost of literally living have left us so burned out we haven’t the time or the energy to add more detail.
I suspect my irritation lies in the fact that liking autumn has not only become a personality, but – because spending and social media go hand in hand – a way of getting us to part with money we don’t have. A pumpkin-spiced chai latte doesn’t come for free and, go on, you definitely need that new-season chocolate-brown knit. Autumn has become a lifestyle, a commodity, not just the passing of the baton from one season to the next.
Maybe my frustration with the people for whom a love of this meteorological phenomenon becomes their defining characteristic is that I fear they are unknowingly playing into the hands of Big Autumn. Or maybe I really do just hate drizzle.
