Millennial Mondays: Memes to Replace Optimism with Magnesium and Mild Outrage (September 28, 2026)

Etai Eshet • Editor

Sep 29, 2026 7:45 AM EDT

October is a few days away, and it made me think of how Halloween used to sneak up on you, but not in a spooky way.

By late September, the vibe would start leaking in slowly. The store would put out a small display of plastic spiders. Someone at school would mention a costume idea. You would flip through a catalog and stare at masks that aren't that scary but are terrifyingly cheap and would be much scarier if we knew what they're made of.

That was the build-up: mostly dependent on whether your neighborhood had one house that went way too hard with fake cobwebs.

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Now, like everything else, Halloween starts 2 months earlier because we have to buy and corps have to sell. My phone starts showing me Halloween decorations before I've physically and emotionally finished sweating through the summer, and every platform shows ten thousand people making “cozy spooky season” videos with twenty candles burning at once, which in mid-August seems less like fall and more like an insurance issue.
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We don’t have to wait for anything to arrive anymore, and that's true to Halloween too. It’s delivered to them daily through their screens. Costume hauls, pumpkin recipes, haunted house rankings, hyper-specific décor collections, and ads for twelve-foot skeletons that cost as much as a car.
By the time October hits, the kids of today have already seen more Halloween content than we saw in an entire childhood.
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And sure, it’s fun. I am not above a fake spiderweb or fake influencers. I just miss when the season had to travel through actual life before it got to you. A store aisle. A friend showing up with a bad costume idea. Life.
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Now Halloween doesn’t slowly arrive. It has robot same-day delivery, and it kicks down the door, sends you a push notification, and asks if you want to add a $79.99 subscription to an animatronic clown.
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