So yesterday was Labor Day. The official end of summer. It’s a day traditionally reserved for cookouts, camping, and enjoying time with family and friends. Traditionally, Labor Day was a day set aside to honor the common American workers who helped change the way our country views its workforce, allowing for economic freedom and liberty. In 1894, it was made an official holiday after years of advocacy by labor unions fighting for better working conditions and reasonable working hours.

History is fascinating to me. One of my guilty pleasures is reading what I call “brain candy” which right now is primarily historical fiction. I love reading a person’s story and understanding how the cultural and historical context can impact someone’s story so deeply. 

Consider, for a moment, the current cultural context we are living in right now, in the year 2026. Consider these realities:

The Epsteins files

Polarized politics

AI

Taylor Swift 

Wars and global uncertainty.
Rising costs and financial pressure.
Social media and the constant stream of information available at our fingertips.

Someday, these things will be part of history. Someone may look back at this particular period of time and study how we lived, what we worried about, what divided us, what entertained us, and what changed us.

But we aren’t studying it. We’re living it. And I wonder if we recognize how much our cultural context is shaping us while we’re in the middle of it.

We are living in a time when information never really stops. There is always another headline to read, another notification to check, another controversy to understand, another opinion to form, another thing we should probably be worried about.

At the same time, many of us are working, raising families, caring for aging parents, managing relationships, paying bills, volunteering, serving, keeping appointments, answering emails, maintaining homes, and trying to remember what we were supposed to pick up at the grocery store. Doing life. 

It’s a lot.

Our brains and bodies weren’t designed to carry the weight of the entire world every hour of every day.

Which brings me back to Labor Day.

There is something interesting about a holiday born, in part, from the recognition that human beings need limits around their labor.

More than a century later, perhaps we still need that reminder. Maybe our “labor” isn’t only the work we are paid to do.

There is emotional labor. Mental labor. Relational labor. The invisible labor of remembering, planning, anticipating, worrying, caring, and carrying.

And perhaps one of the questions we need to ask ourselves isn’t simply, “Am I working too much?”

Maybe it’s:

What am I carrying that I was never meant to carry all the time?

Because rest isn’t just taking a day off. Sometimes rest means putting down the phone, deciding that you don’t need an opinion about everything happening in the world. Sometimes it means sitting outside while summer slowly gives way to fall. Sometimes it means being fully present with the people sitting across the table from you and sometimes it means recognizing that the world will continue turning even if you stop carrying it for a little while.

Labor Day may mark the unofficial end of summer.

But perhaps it can also serve as an invitation.

To notice the pace we’ve been keeping.

To notice the weight we’ve been carrying.

And to remember that we are human beings living through history—not machines designed to endlessly consume it, respond to it, and keep producing through it.

There is work worth doing.

There are things worth caring deeply about.

But there is also a time to put the work down.

And maybe that’s a lesson from history worth carrying forward.

💜