Labor Day arrives each year wearing white pants and carrying the faint smell of lighter fluid, ostensibly to honor the American worker, who is busy answering Slack messages from a grocery store parking lot while an artificial intelligence summarizes the meeting that eliminated his department.
We have achieved wonders.
Billionaires are building rockets, bunkers and increasingly elaborate explanations for why the rest of us should be delighted to train our replacements. The future, we’re told, will be frictionless. And apparently “friction” means liveable salaries, lunch breaks, health insurance and Sabrina in HR who knows where everything is.
Meanwhile, summer ends. The inflatable flamingo goes back into the garage. Children return to school. The light changes. And Americans perform our annual ritual of pretending the calendar has ordered us indoors to work harder for people whose yachts have lifeboats that are also the size of yachts (and so on).
Perhaps we should decline.
The traditional end of summer needn’t be a rehearsal for the end times. September can be an invitation to shrink the aperture. Turn off the feed. Stop doomscrolling the imperial weather report. Let Silicon Valley hallucinate its planetary destiny without monetizing our minute-by-minute attention.
There is work closer at hand.
The town needs a bakery. A newspaper. A band. A mechanic. A teacher. A carpenter. Somebody who grows tomatoes that taste like tomatoes. Somebody who organizes the parade, fixes the projector, pours the wine, knows the creek, remembers the dead and welcomes the new kid.
This is an economy, too. Better yet—it’s a civilization.
Maybe the grand political project of our age is embarrassingly small: Create places to which we want to belong. Spend locally. Hire friends. Make actual objects. Trade skills. Share tools. Start clubs. Feed people. Publish stories. Throw parties. Know your neighbors well enough to borrow a ladder without opening an app.
Call it a micro city-state if you want to sound dangerous. Call it mutual aid if you want to sound organized. Our ancestors had a simpler word:
Village.
Let the machines have the cloud. Let the billionaires have Mars.
We’ve got September, Main Street and each other.
Daedalus Howell is the editor of this paper and is permanently pre-IPO at dhowell.com.
