This weekend, while you’re working the grill or attending a parade or sitting in traffic, conversation will turn, inevitably, to the end of summer. Labor Day, nominally a holiday celebrating the industriousness of the American worker, also serves to remind the worker that they haven’t been quite as industrious as they might have been these past three months. In his eulogy for summer’s lazy days in The Times today, my colleague Stephen Kurutz mourns the vestiges of truly unmonitored working from home that this fall seems to augur: “Will we forget the small pleasure of sitting on a porch and looking at the yard?” he writes. Of trading the daily commute for an aimless drive?”Why must there be such an austere demarcation between before Labor Day and after, between summer and not-summer, between enjoying our lives and enduring them? Why have we so internalized the back-to-school dread of childhood that it’s become a permanent feature of adulthood?

---

Persons: You’ll, Stephen Kurutz, it’s Organizations: Labor, The Times Locations: The