Beach Bummer

The world is burning. Have another piña colada.

- By Lauren Groff

I hate the beach. My skin burns and blisters as soon as the sun touches it, I dislike sweating without exercising, and sand makes no sense at all to me— it’s just hot and gritty dirt that other people apparently enjoy rolling around in. I was raised by parents whose idea of leisure is cutting miles of trails in the woods and painting an entire house by hand, so the prospect of enforced idleness makes me panicky. Plus, the ocean itself, while aesthetically pleasing, is terrifyingly untrustworthy, with its riptides and hurricanes and tsunamis and sharks and microplastics and slithering monsters of the deep. It has just too many sneaky ways to kill you.

When I have gone on beach vacations, it’s been under duress. I married into a family of generous people who are also horrifying extroverts, and whose notion of a good time is a nice, boozy, mostly reclined stay on some tropical island together. But for catastrophists like me, the luxury beach resort raises a whole new set of psychological torments on top of those provided by more ordinary beaches. The entire time that we’re in our ostensible paradise, I’m busy obsessing over the unintended consequences of our stay, such as the environmental degradation caused by bringing wasteful tourists to delicate ecosystems and the racist and classist issues of displacement. The Situationists, as usual, said it best in Paris in the spring of 1968, when, in protest of capitalism, they scrawled graffiti reading Club Med: a cheap holiday in other people’s misery.