Rebecca Traister insists this might be the worst summer ever. Balk counters with a nugget of hope and nostalgia for an increasingly apocalyptic future:

I see an army of young people out there having a good time. They retain all the optimism of youth. Their prospects may be just as grim as everyone else's, but they don't let that affect them. They use their relative poverty to their advantage, creating fun through thrift. They are building the very memories that they will look back on a couple of decades from now and think, "Man, that was the greatest summer ever."

And it will absolutely be true. Two decades from now we will all be bog people living in warring tribes among the marshes of the New Jersey Meadowlands, skinning rats to provide pelts for warmth and eating their chemically-infested flesh for the tiny bits of protein we are able to provide to our bodies. As the kids of today huddle around the tire fires of tomorrow, they will tell stories to their undersized, two-headed children (assuming mankind remains fertile then) about those balmy summer days before the floods and fires when a six pack of beer and a bittorrented rip of the new Arcade Fire were very heaven. It will sound like paradise.