Pumpkin spice is here to stay. It’s time to accept it and move on.

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This week, Starbucks began selling its seasonal pumpkin spice lattes, an annual event that has become the symbolic starting pistol of the crisp, floating-leaf, cable-knit autumn of our collective imagination. Never mind that, back in the right-side-up world, summer sweat is still rolling down our backs.

But something feels different this year as we peruse the aisles of the grocery store, already laden with an ever-expanding assortment of cookie dough and cocoa mixes and candles scented with clove and allspice. The vibe, it seems, has shifted for pumpkin spice. Or rather, it seems pumpkin spice is no longer a recognizable vibe. Instead, it’s just inevitable. Like death, taxes and new Taylor Swift albums, pumpkin spice is now merely a part of the human condition.

Throw pumpkin spice into the pile of things that once served as cultural markers but now read as neutral: Denim and tattoos, for example, were once reserved for the counterculture, but now they’re just as at home at the PTA as in the demimonde. Punk music now sells minivans.

So goes it with pumpkin spice, which used to be seen as part of a lifestyle choice, a signifier of the flavor’s most ardent acolytes: women (mostly White, mostly with flawless highlights) who loved brunch and cozy sweaters and pick-your-own apple orchards and painted signs in their kitchens reminding them to dream. Now pumpkin spice season arrives like any other meteorological phenomenon. It’s here for everyone, like it or not.

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“You are bound to run into something pumpkin-spiced, maybe pancakes or a seasonal drink,” says Melanie Zanoza Bartelme, who tracks food trends for market-research firm Mintel. “You can’t avoid it, so you don’t have to be embarrassed about enjoying it. It’s here. It’s all around us.”

Emily Contois, an assistant professor at the University of Tulsa who studies food and media, likened the flavor’s mainstreaming to that of Uggs, those fluffy-lined boots that make their wearers look like they have baked potatoes for feet. Ultra trendy in the late 1990s and early aughts, they were soon written off by the fashion elite only to be ironically revived every so often. Now, they’re just another brand. “It was either, ‘Oh, that’s a bubble that’s going to burst,’ or ‘We’re never wearing these again,’” she says. “But then these boots became part of our lives.”

Some cynics inevitably still scorn those who embrace #pumpkinspiceSZN with Instagram gusto, but along with the mockery on social media, there’s another strain of thinking that seems borne of the near-universal slog of the last few years: Maybe just let it go? If a PSL isn’t your thing, just order your regular latte. Or don’t. Do you.

As one proponent of that attitude warned on Twitter on the day of the Starbucks pumpkin-spice latte debut: “Y’ALL, listen to me. There will be NO pumpkin spice slander today. Today we are going to let people enjoy things!!!!”

“Who cares if someone is excited about a Taylor Swift album or a pumpkin spice latte?” another wrote. “Let people feel joy and leave them alone.”

It’s not your imagination: Pumpkin spice products really are proliferating. They accounted for more than $231 million in sales over the last year, according to NielsenIQ data, which is nearly 27 percent higher than the year before. This season, Oreo is offering a limited-time pumpkin spice flavor for the first time since 2017.

The flavor is especially concentrated in the breakfast category, which makes sense given its barista-borne origins. You can find it in cereals (including Special K, Frosted Mini-Wheats and Cheerios), baked goods (Thomas bagels and English muffins and Pillsbury Grands) and yogurts (Chobani, Siggi’s and Oui). Coffee creamers and cold brews abound. In my recent Washington-area shopping rounds, I didn’t see any of the novelty products that marked the…