Why this summer is the season of nothingness (& why that's ok)

I’m not currently in "summer" per se, being in the Southern Hemisphere and all.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t experience it vicariously through my social media feed. (Yes, I see you shaking your ass on a yacht. Yes, I hate you for it. And yes, I'm just salty because I'm freezing my ass off and pale as an 18th century peasant with consumption.)

Anyway, there’s a whopping void I’ve noticed about the summer I’m not participating in. It’s void of, well, fkn anything.

Remember when summers had a thing?

Last year, brat green was smeared across feeds like guacamole at a bottomless brunch. The year before, Barbie pink turned every brand activation into a Mattel marketing wet dream. There were songs of the summer, movies of the summer, colours of the summer. Cocktails were branded. But this year it's eerily... bland. Silent, almost. The summer of nothingness. A cultural shrug emoji.

Scroll your feed and you’ll see the problem: it’s not that trends don’t exist. It’s that there are too many of them, too fast, too small. Nothing gets room to breathe.

The sheer velocity of micro-trends means culture feels less like a shared playlist and more like a Discord server where everyone’s listening to their own thing on loop.

This is fragmentation on steroids. No unifying vibe, no monoculture moment, no one trend to rule them all. Every corner of the internet has its own “song of the summer,” and no two playlists overlap. And the result is that culture feels blegh. Not dead, but absolutely drowned in noise.

The economy plays a part here, too. When people are broke, anxious, and tired, you don’t get brat summers. You get survival summers (girl, the tariffs). Brands aren’t splashing big dollars on cultural takeovers, consumers aren’t rallying behind big, bold vibes, and risk-aversion leads to aesthetic beige blegh.

I don’t know if it's just me, but this “nothingness” is actually telling.

Maybe it’s not a cultural failure, but a reset (please be a reset.)

The Barbie summer was orchestrated by a freaking marketing army. Brat summer had a rare perfect storm of music, memeability, and aesthetic stickiness. But lightning doesn’t strike the same place twice, or three times, in this sense. And you can’t manufacture lightning every year.

The lack of a vibe might be proof that the internet is finally rejecting the forced monoculture moments brands have been trying to shove down our throats.

So then, what does this mean for marketers?

IMO, stop hunting for the moment. It’s not coming. Instead, zoom into the small, specific, resonant stuff. I've said it before and I’ll say it again, micro-communities are where culture actually lives now.

A single subcultural reference can be more powerful than another round of “official brand pink.” It was getting hard to look at, anyway.

How to navigate the blegh era:

• Pick a lane, not the highway: you don’t need to “own culture,” you just need to own a niche that makes sense for your brand. One strong micro-moment > chasing the ghost of monoculture.

• Go slow to go sticky: trends now burn out in days. Instead of scrambling to hop on every one, focus on creating work that can live longer… even if it’s only in front of a smaller audience. Longevity is the new virality.

• Become a curator, not a conductor: culture is too fragmented to orchestrate. So curate what resonates with your community, amplify it, and let them carry it. You’re not making the anthem, you’re making the playlist.

• Embrace smallness: in an attention economy this fragmented, intimacy wins. A “nothing” summer is your chance to build something that matters to 1,000 people, not 1 million.

This season of nothingness is both a warning and an opportunity.

The warning: monoculture isn’t coming back. The opportunity: if you stop trying to dominate everything, you can matter deeply to someone.

Maybe that’s what this year’s summer anthem is: not brat, not Barbie, but a chorus of fragmented, niche-specific vibes, each one sung too quietly to go viral, but loud enough for the people who care.

-Sophie Randell, Writer