Summer's end is upon us, and I am once again, as I have every year since young adolescence, reeling.
The New York Times calls this particular anxiety the "September Scaries." For me, it's always been something of an acute melancholy, a pang of sadness that packs in so much of the existential: transition, the inexorable march of time, anguish over what never got accomplished.
So today, on this very sleepy Friday before Labor Day, I'm wondering how we can ease into fall, a time of cold responsibility and that awful feeling that you've got to get your shambled life in control—or else.
A big part of the solution feels like it rests on our labor. You know, making it so that your job doesn't have you in a chokehold day in and out. Here at Mother Jones, where our bread and butter is the labor beat, we've got a slew of reporting and terrific essays on this very issue: improving working conditions; the power of unions; the politics of a true workers' party; making work suck just a tiny bit less. Not so that every day feels like a vacation, but so that the daily lives of Americans, where so many of us feel the pressures of the grind while never feeling like we're doing enough, can just be lighter.
—Inae Oh
