The summer solstice will occur on Thursday. That’s the day with the most sunshine and the most direct sunlight in the Northern Hemisphere.

It’s also the day that folks will declare the “official start of summer.”

Bah.

There is no “official” first day of summer, because there is no governing authority of our seasons.

By most people’s definition, we are already in summer today, June 18. By many definitions, we’ve been in summer for weeks.

The four seasons are a social construct. (Tellingly, not every part of the world observes four seasons.) They reflect natural facts beyond our control — namely, the tilt of the Earth and thus the angle of the sun’s rays, and in turn the weather.

There are objectively 365.25 days each year because the Earth rotates on its axis 365.25 times in every round trip around the sun. In contrast, dividing the year up into four seasons, just like dividing it up into 12 months, is a human conceit. It’s a good one, I believe. Eight seasons or two seasons or seven seasons would bring more confusion than clarity.

The solstices and equinoxes are rational points at which to divide the year up into four segments if you think astronomically. But most of us are not astronomers, and nobody elected the astronomers as the governing authority over the seasons.

If you are a K-12 school kid or a parent of one, your summer begins on the last day of school. Whether you or your children are in school affects your life in a much greater way than whether your patch of the Earth is inclining toward the sun or away from it. (It’s an odd detail about astronomical summer that every single day of the summer is shorter than the one before it.)

Maybe for you and your family, summer is when the neighborhood pool is open. Socially, summer starts on Memorial Day weekend.

Often, we speak as though summer is June, July, and August — meteorologists claim this definition as meteorological summer. Why would we make the astronomers, rather than the weathermen, the officers of summer?

There’s an important philosophical error, I believe, underlying the tendency of our media and many other people to declare the solstice the “official” first day of summer.

We often want social constructs to be facts of nature, while we simultaneously treat some facts of nature as social constructs. (Consider the new phrase “gender assigned at birth” in place of “sex.”)

Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about man’s desire for simple, universal rules. Thus, we fight about whether tomatoes are “really a vegetable or a fruit,” when the answer is “it depends on what you’re trying to communicate with the word.”

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Likewise, some nerds will say that killer whales “aren’t really whales” but are actually the largest dolphin. Again, that’s presuming some absolute, objective, God-ordained definition of whale and dolphin.

Instead, words like whale, fruit, and summer are useful categories we invented. These categories allow us to better understand the world and plan our life. It’s very important to have shared understanding of these categories, but that doesn’t justify declaring astronomers as the authority over what season it is.