Good News About Your Broke-Ass Summer

Let’s get creative, people.

Photo by Paul Kim / Unsplash.

A senseless war raging in the Middle East has sent gas prices through the roof — and airfares along with it. So if you didn’t book your summer vacation airfare before March (kudos if you did!), then you’re looking at higher fares and limited options as airlines cut flights and routes. As for the good old car road trip, well, $4/gallon prices will hit the budget hard.

If the money math means this is the summer you will forgo a big trip, you won’t be alone. We’ve been thinking about ways to turn this lemon into a cool lemonade and we have some suggestions.

Explore Your Own Backyard

This is a theme we keep coming back to at Fathom; one we confess we don’t always practice ourselves. (Pavia’s been wanting to go to Dia:Beacon for, um, 20 years.) So here’s a challenge: Make a list of those five to ten things you’ve always been meaning to do and actually do them. This summer.

Give yourself some structure. Set a limit, like staying within a two-hour drive. Or pick a theme — arts and culture, nature and adventure, food and drink — and design a two- or three-day itinerary around it. The days don’t have to be consecutive; think of each summer month as one chapter of a larger story.

Come September, you’ll know your corner of the world far better than you did in June. Your friends, back from their expensive vacations, will say, “I’ve always wanted to do that!” And they’ll ask for all your notes.

Go to Summer School

As an adult with a mortgage and a full in-box, signing up for a class might feel a little indulgent. But what if you reframed it as the most intentional thing you do all summer? Pick a skill you’ve always wanted to develop — a language, a craft, a subject that got away — and give yourself the summer as your deadline. Community college courses, continuing education classes, and online tutorials are affordable, social, low-stakes, and surprisingly fun when nobody’s grading you on a curve. (Maybe this is the summer Jeralyn finally takes that archery class.) You’ll have something real and tangible to show for those three months, and that will feel good.

Deep Dive into the Screen

Not a movie, a world. There’s a difference between watching a film set in Rome and spending three weeks working your way through every Marcello Mastroianni picture you can find. Pick your universe and go deep. That might mean watching every film in the Star Wars saga in release order (or machete order, if you want to argue about it). Or it might mean doing what Pavia did last month: take a slow trip back to Victorian and Edwardian England via two Netflix seasons of The Forsyte Saga (2002), starring a pre-Billions Damian Lewis. It was brooding, magnificent, completely binge-worthy.

Host a Regular Gathering

Despite being creatures of habit, there is something a little radical about showing up for the same people, in the same place, on a regular basis. A weekly or monthly summer gathering does what a vacation rarely can: It roots you. Don’t wait to be invited; host the summer happening you want for yourself: a backyard movie screening, a Friday evening bike ride, a group soup kitchen session, a happy hour park picnic. Instead of escaping your life for a week, you fall in love with your neighbors and your block slowly, over backyard evenings, cold drinks, and borrowed folding chairs.

If you’re ready to join our summer of alternative fun, tell us in the comments what you’ll be doing while we’re watching every damn Star Wars and stringing bows on arrows.