You're listening to Life Kit from NPR.

Hey everybody, it's Mariel.

You know, I feel like certain months and seasons just have a really good marketing team.

Like, everybody loves fall, the colored leaves, the pumpkin spice, everything, the magic of Halloween.

And my God, the way people talk about summer, as if it's just a string of perfect days, we

spend basking in the sunshine, eating popsicles, going to the beach with friends.

The truth is, every season comes with its own indignities.

Like the amount of time I've spent standing on a subway platform in 95-degree heat,

sweating bullets, and scratching my mosquito bites while I wait for the train.

But we ignore all that, choosing to think of some seasons as this romantic ideal.

And then we don't extend the same courtesy to winter, especially January and February.

When we imagine winter, we imagine it based on its worst day. So we imagine the coldest,

wettest, windiest, darkest day, even when that day is not the norm. Carrie Leibowitz grew up on the Jersey Shore.

It's a summer destination.

And she says, on the Jersey Shore, everybody knows.

Winter sucks.

It is this cultural knowing and it's such an ingrained knowing that it doesn't feel like an opinion.

It feels like a fact, right?

Like the fact is winter is depressing.

Winter is bad for your physical and mental health and well-being.

End of story.

And then right after college, before she got her PhD in psychology,

...