Summer used to synchronise adulthood. Now it shows how differently we live.

Adulthood used to be organised by two moments in time, regardless of what life stage you were in: Christmas, when we all got together, and summer, when we did the same.

Christmas still looks and feels largely the same as it always has. Yet summer feels different these days.

When I grew up in Wales, summer was dictated by school and also by the factories shutting down for two weeks every year. The whole town felt like it ran on the same clock.

In my twenties, I got smarter about summer. I skipped the school holidays and travelled when it was cheaper outside of them. Then, when I moved to New York, I did something very different. A group of us rented a house for the summer, so every weekend you could escape the city. Summer was a series of weekend getaways, a temporary life between Friday and Sunday.

I thought of those as different summers in my life that evolved and changed as I did.

But I’m not sure that’s true. I think summer has changed.

Summer Was When Adulthood Lined Up

Adulthood used to look similar from one person to the next. I’ve described that as everyone having a mirror life. Education, work, partnership, marriage, children, all happened in that order, more or less, for most people.

Today, when you look at someone else’s life, what is reflected back can look completely different. The same milestones show up in different places, at different ages, in different combinations, or they don’t show up at all.

I’ve called that shift the move from mirror lives to kaleidoscope lives.

And summer is one of the seasons when the mirror used to be most visible. Now it might be the best one to watch it break.

The Milestones Stayed. The Timing Didn’t.

Summer is synonymous with wedding season. It’s when you’d go to a wedding, meet friends’ partners, hear who got engaged and also discover who had started a family.

Then you had those with children, or those who were teachers, whose lives were dictated by the school holidays. Holidays had to be booked six months in advance as there was no flexibility.

Those milestones are still there. What’s changed is the timing, and that fewer people are moving through them at all.

Take marriage. For people born in 1973, half of women were married by 31 and half of men by 35. A decade later, those numbers had shifted to 35 and 40. People in their early thirties are still one of the largest groups getting married in the UK but you can be at a summer wedding and have a guest who married at 28, another marrying for the first time at 39, someone who is divorced and getting married for the second time, and someone who has decided marriage just isn’t for them.

That, to me, is the kaleidoscope life.

There Isn’t One Summer Anymore

Because lives have changed, we’re seeing summer holidays change.

ABTA’s research has found that younger adults without children are increasingly travelling in June and July, while older adults without children are more likely to go in May and September. And what’s interesting is there are also a growing number of parents taking adults-only trips where they go away without the kids to rest and recover.

Summer hasn’t disappeared, it’s fractured.

There’s the same old school-holiday version. Then there’s the childfree version. There’s the version where you split the kids across weeks after a divorce. And the version where you’re fitting things around visiting or caring for elderly relatives. And like my New York version, rather than taking one big holiday in summer, you split it across multiple long weekends.

Forty years ago, these would have read as the exceptions, the different ways to do summer. Now there isn’t really a right way to do summer anymore.

Even Summer Is Moving Out of Summer

June and September used to be the clever, cheaper workarounds at either end of summer. Easier to get flights, tables and hotels in the places you wanted to go.

Now rising costs and hotter summers are pushing people towards them for reasons that have nothing to do with being clever anymore. The summer season itself is drifting too, bleeding further into spring and autumn.

It’s also changing how breaks and holidays look throughout the year. You used to work all year, take a fortnight here, add to the bank holidays and for some the school holidays, then repeated, repeated, repeated until you retired.

Some people have started breaking their year into festival weekends and shorter trips instead. Shorter and more frequent. Others have gone the other way and started taking

whole chunks of time off in the middle of a career. A midlife gap year. A sabbatical. Or now a “micro-retirement”, rather than banking all that freedom for the end.

Marriage moved. Parenthood moved. Careers moved. Holidays, and how we take our time off, was destined to change too.

More Freedom Means More Negotiation

Work has become more flexible for many people, depending on the industry. Now you can structure the breaks and escapes you want, around your lifestyle. But in giving flexibility what’s interesting is what has gone missing in summer.

We’ve lost the mid-point collective rest. A pause halfway through the year.

Now you have to negotiate and plan that rest for yourself. How many people are already off that week? Is there someone to cover for you? Is the client going to be away then too? Can I actually switch off?

Increasingly, the answer to that last question seems to be no. Recent UK research found almost half of employees check work messages while they are on annual leave, while another survey found 21% of people didn’t use their full allowance, with 26% carrying over more than 15 unused days.

And as Britain heads into what used to be its summer lull, new research from HiBob found that 47% of workers say there’s no longer a clear quiet period at work at all. 58% of people believe that over the last two years pressure has increased in their role, and nearly half now feel they’re expected to be reachable.

In 2024/25 almost a million people in Britain reported work-related stress, depression or anxiety, costing 22 million working days.

What we may have lost is the environment that allowed taking holiday to become genuine rest, particularly in summertime.

When we all stopped at the same time, you didn’t have to wonder what was happening while you were off. Today, your inbox keeps filling up and work continues without you. You can take time off, but you are the one responsible for creating the boundary around actually being off.

But that’s not the case everywhere. In Sweden, July is a month when large swathes of working life winds down. In Finland, summer leave is still built into the year. These countries do not fully stop, but the expectation of productivity in summer is lower.

There’s a big difference in taking a holiday while everything around you carries on at full speed and taking one in a culture that expects work to slow down.

We’ve stopped synchronising adulthood, we’ve decoupled our holidays, but in doing so have we also stopped synchronising rest.

The New Inequality Is Control of Your Calendar

The ability to choose when and where you work, and when you rest, is amazing. But it only works for certain people. Some people are still tied to the school holidays and must take their breaks when the kids are off. For others, the flexibility simply isn’t there in their career.

When everyone else has time off, some businesses still need to keep going. Airports need staff all year round. Hotels peak in holiday seasons. Hospitals, hospitality, shops and transport systems still have to work.

One person’s summer often depends on somebody else having an inflexible one. And that’s where Christmas gets interesting.

What Christmas Still Knows

One thing I like about my kaleidoscope life is the flexibility. I take my time off when I want to. I can do it on a whim solo, but if I want to spend time with other people, I must plan it.

There is still one moment in the year when we all enjoy collective rest: Christmas.

For a few days in December, everyone’s life gets a little more still, even if just for a day. People synchronise. We seem to have lost some of that in summer.

Maybe it was never just about the factory shutdown making sense to employers. Maybe some of the joy came from everyone stopping together, everyone having nothing to do.

We’re not living our lives in sync anymore but maybe it’s still worth keeping some moments when everyone is allowed to put life down and rest.

This piece is part of a series examining Kaleidoscope Lives: what happens when adulthood stops following a shared sequence. Read next: “We Expected a Mirror. We Got a Kaleidoscope” and “Milestones or Turns: What Actually Changes a Life.”