the vibe shift

does everyone else feel like everything is bad rn or is it just me?

oh no

It’s nearly midnight on the second Wednesday of the year and I am lying in bed watching Los Angeles burn on my iPhone screen. In New York this week, the wind speeds were at times higher than the temperature. My Apple Watch scolds me; I have not gone outside enough. The latest nonsense—although that word feels dismissive knowing how dangerous it really is—from our felon-elect is that he wants to buy Greenland. Amazon announced they’ll release a documentary on his wife, a cheeky little way to covertly funnel millions into the administration while simultaneously making propaganda. There were more newsroom layoffs this week, this time at the Bezos-owned Washington Post, which operates under the slogan Democracy dies in darkness.

Maybe it does. But here, inside my dim apartment, where I shiver under layers of clothes and blankets—the pre-war radiator only ever seems to operate at full blast when the weather is mild—and switch from tab to tab, I think: perhaps the human brain was not meant to process this much destructive information in real time. I think: How much time do we have when so many people are refusing to turn on the lights?

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Three years ago—when the pandemic was still fresh and we kept up with the new variants and surges, when eggs didn’t cost $5, when we thought there could not possibly be a path in which an insurrectionist could return to the nation’s highest office, when our president didn’t seem quite as useless and genocidal as he does now—New York Magazine writer Allison P. Davis informed us all that a vibe shift was upon us. Life had been very bad—it had even come to a screeching halt—but now it was starting back up again, and bringing with it upon its return a new and emerging collective culture.

Back then, the “vibe shift” was more about the study of aesthetics, a way of grouping together a million little micro-trends together into one cultural movement. Initially coined by trend forecaster Sean Monahan—remember “normcore”? yeah, that was him—the term was intended to be a name for the revival of early aughts nostalgia popping up everywhere from fashion (the return of low-rise jeans, Uggs, tiny shoulder bags) to music (indie sleaze, teen girly pop) to film (the return of Josh Hartnett, the ongoing Lindsay Lohan comeback, whatever A24’s Y2K was). But quickly “vibe shift” became amorphous. The economy was going through a vibe shift. There was a vibe shift in the job market, then in Hollywood, the food industry, nightlife, entire cities. Anything that could change—which are most things—and did change—which most did—had a vibe, and that vibe, it seemed, was shifting. Monahan still stuck to his original definition, but conceded: “To address bigger changes in culture, behavior, and outlook, perhaps the term vibe shift does a better job?”

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More than a decade ago, Time ran a cover story called The Me Me Me Generation, a four-thousand word diatribe against millennials by Joel Stein. According to Stein (who is Gen X but writes of young people with all the spite of a stereotypical boomer), millennials are entitled, narcissistic, and obnoxiously anxious. Stein’s reporting was largely criticized at the time—it’s full of cherry-picked data and sweeping generalizations—but I still think about the story often. It is not new or unusual for an older generation to shit on the youth, to proclaim that it’s all over, that the kids are very much not alright. But what was different about this was that the world was falling apart, and millennials were demonized for being angry about it. What is it, exactly, that millennials—the poorest generation since the Great Depression—feel entitled to? Is it fair wages and salary equity? Owning more than a meager 4.6 percent of the national wealth? Affordable housing? Health insurance? A stable job market? Clean air and water? Renewable energy? Fewer guns? Less genocide? Lower maternal mortality rates and cheaper childcare? The simple ability to piss in whichever bathroom they please? Sure, you could absolutely place some of the blame for our anxiety on our phones, but maybe—just maybe—a great deal of it is in response to the absence of everything our parents and grandparents had that we do not, and may not ever, possess, and all of the consequences for actions that our parents and grandparents ignored that we will instead inherit.

But the real reason I think about the me me me generation so often is because it seems as if, more than ten years later, the descriptor finally feels relevant. It’s just that there is no delineation by age anymore. Look around: the vibe shift is no longer imminent. It’s here. The me me me generation isn’t a group of people. It’s an era, the state of the world we are all living through. Perhaps it wasn’t a shift at all; maybe it was here all along, simmering underneath all the vibe shifts that came before. The vibe isn’t early-aughts fashion (is it really a vibe shift if a trend doesn’t expand past pockets of very online kids in major cities) or a reboot of The Simple Life on a streaming platform no one watches. It’s bigger than that, more deeply rooted and far more depressing.

The vibe now is hyper-individualism, and it’s safe to say there are far more people following this trend than there are wearing jeans that expose their ass cracks. You want to bring your dog with you into a CVS, let it roam the allergy aisle while snifflers search for Sudafed? Sure, go ahead. Don’t let that salesperson tell you only service dogs are allowed; the customer is always right. Want your toddler to hold up the line at a busy airport so he can do things himself? Absolutely! Gone are the days you’ll find people scolding “this isn’t a playground”—the whole world is your child’s Montessori school! Do you have music you want to listen to, or a TikTok you’d like to watch, or a call you’d like to take, but don’t have any headphones with you? Set that phone on speaker! Let’s all hear it! Perhaps you would like to object to much-needed congestion pricing in the most walkable city in the country with the best (in spite of its flaws) public transit system because it means you’ll have to pay $9 every time you drive from your luxury apartment on 61st Street and Fifth Avenue to see your young children at their mother’s house on East 79th. We’re sitting on a loaded gun for a bird flu pandemic, but that hasn’t stopped the woman who walks around my neighborhood dumping buckets of birdseed for pigeons every day. “Go fuck yourself,” she screams at me when I calmly tell her that what she is doing is not only disgusting and attracting more rodents, but dangerous. “Go talk to your psychiatrist about it. I’ll do whatever I want.” There it is. There’s the vibe: I don’t owe anyone anything, and fuck you if you don’t like that.

I am old enough to still remember the times when a disaster as devastating as Los Angeles’ wildfires would bring the country together. I can recall the rallying of people after 9/11 or Katrina or Sandy; the collective grief after Sandy Hook or Parkland. Now there are too many holes to poke. Now everyone has misinformation at their fingertips, or fancies themselves an expert in morality. The L.A. fires are a conspiracy—no, they’re an act of arson. (They’re neither.) The people in Los Angeles deserve devastation for knowingly living in an environment that regularly catches fire—no, they deserve destruction because they’re rich. (Nearly every environment in which we make our homes is prone to some sort of natural disaster; Los Angeles—particularly the area of the Eaton and Altadena fires—is full of poor and working class people.) We shouldn’t feel sorry for Billy Crystal losing his home because he has the money to rebuild it. (Not getting into the potential Hollywood history that may have been destroyed, losing your home of 46 years is a loss that exceeds monetary value.) Mandy Moore shouldn’t share a GoFundMe for her in-laws who lost everything when she has plenty of money. (Many seemingly-big actors, particularly post-strike, actually live paycheck to paycheck, and are not cash-rich enough to pay to rebuild their homes and the homes of someone else when a bulk of their net worth is tied up in that damaged home.) The Oscars should be canceled; we don’t need to see the wealthy play dress up at a time like this. (The Oscars are not just about the A-list and are a valuable source of income for an entire industry of below the line workers—from hair and makeup artists to production crew and marketing teams—who rely on that work.) There may be large pockets of people coming together on a local level for mutual aid, but the city itself, as a whole, cannot even unite in the most basic way.

I don’t know how to tell you this in any plainer terms, but: You do owe something to people, and you should want to owe something to people. You need to have a baseline of empathy for others, and care about their needs being met—even the people you hate. You can’t just do whatever you want, whenever you want to. There are rules and structure for a reason. The interconnectedness of us all is the very basis of humanity. We are not wild beings fending for ourselves in the woods; we are people who depend on communities and relationships to sustain both ourselves and society as we know it. You not only should want to care about people other than yourself. You have to.

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It would be easy to blame the vibe shift on Covid, to say that a year inside irrevocably changed people, made them forget all social skills, made them lose any semblance of how to behave in public or have empathy or simply be a normal fucking person. And, yes, maybe some of the blame can be placed on the pandemic that is still raging on even as we try to ignore the science and proclaim we are post-it simply because we are tired—but not all of it. Remember the early days of 2020? The days when we would lean out our windows and bang pots and pans with our neighbors, the days when we would volunteer to go grocery shopping for those who couldn’t, the masks we would donate to those who had none? People actually cared about each other; I felt hope even in the bleakest of situations. I cannot pinpoint precisely when that ended. Maybe my memory is skewing things. Maybe people weren’t as kind as I remember, and that solidarity was never as widespread as it seemed. Maybe I am forgetting how much anxiety I continued to feel during this time, or just how long this hope I believe I felt lasted before it dissipated. Maybe I had simply the idea of hope; maybe hope—real hope, true optimism, honest belief that a better future would come, eventually—was never actually there to begin with.

Last year I wrote about a wave of toxic positivity in pop culture, about how everywhere I looked, optimism was pushed to an almost oppressive degree. People were telling us to be happy, to forget that we had lived through a trauma that had fundamentally changed us, forget that the world had rapidly turned unspeakably grim. If that was a vibe shift, it was short lived. This year, I see no optimism, not from myself, and not from others. We cannot hope our way out of this; it’s hard to believe that almost two decades have passed since the concept of hope felt so within grasp that an entire presidential campaign could be built upon that single word. A new sort of despair, a numbing out, is setting in. “I don’t know,” a friend of mine says over the phone as we catch up on each other’s lives, “everything just feels so…bad. Like, different bad.” Another remarks that things feel very “series finale,” a common joke online that no longer feels funny when she says it. Another friend recounts hearing a stranger’s bleak game plan for the next four years with bewilderment. “I can’t even think further than four days out anymore, let alone four years,” she says. Job interviewers ask me where I see myself in five years, and I resist telling them the truth: I don’t know. Or, rather, more simply: Alive?

And when it isn’t a dissociated type of despair, it’s anger and rage. I can feel my deep-seated cynicism returning. I can feel myself hardening. I type ugly replies to strangers on the internet that I delete just before I hit send; I think “fucking idiot” about at least five people I do not know per day. “Every day I feel closer and closer to him,” I say, texting my mom a screenshot of John Goodman in The Big Lebowski. His face is contorted with rage, he holds a gun to the ceiling. “Has the whole world gone crazy!? Am I the only one around here who gives a shit about the rules!?” he bellows.

It’s not just me; fury is everywhere I look. Joe Biden warns in his final address that an oligarchy is taking shape, and people immediately reach for the now-ubiquitous responsibility-deflecting screenshot from I Think You Should Leave. According to Forbes annual billionaires list, the United States had 614 billionaires worth a combined $2.9 trillion in 2020. By the end of 2024, that number had surged to 813 billionaires worth a combined $5.7 trillion. We’re all trying to find the guy who did this, Tim Robinson yells. I understand why the CEO shooter is a public hero, and why, even if I don’t believe they’re the same person, Luigi Mangione is lusted after. A ban on TikTok in the so-called name of data security is imminent while people protest the not-so-subtle act of censorship with a common refrain of: “It’s my data. What if I don’t want Mark Zuckerberg to have exclusive access to it?” Thousands, if not millions, of young Americans are flocking to a similar Chinese-owned app out of spite. I ignore for the moment that for all the good power it has, TikTok has also decimated our brains and that 54 percent of adults are functionally illiterate and cannot read at a sixth grade level. This is one of the many things I am trying to not be so angry about.

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I go out with a guy and we talk about the time last summer—or was it two summers ago? the time is blurring together—when New York City surprise dropped a video PSA about what to do in the event of a nuclear attack. And as we drink our nightcaps in a dystopian sports bar we stumbled into in Chelsea, I tell him about how I think about the possibility all the time. "Don't ask me how or why, just know that the big one has hit,” I laugh, reciting the video’s opening lines. I tell him how I read once that the likely scenario would be a van bomb, and that if it went off in Lower Manhattan, everyone within 100 feet of the blast would get instantly reduced to atoms, and how for years I thought I’d perhaps get lucky by being at work when it happened.

I try to make a joke of all of this, try to laugh as I tell him how I watched the video and felt equal parts panic—I had no idea if my apartment building had a basement, or if it did, if it was even accessible—and practicality—how I bought gallons of water and a bug out bag, how I thought to prepare ahead. It’s funny, I insist. It’s something to make fun of me for. The human brain’s survival impulse is something to mock, I say. For years, I had talked a big game, paraphrased Fran Lebowitz, said I had no intentions of surviving a catastrophic disaster. I tell him how I took my lack of desire to be a final girl to the extreme, had expressed to my mother’s horror my concern that everyday people couldn’t acquire cyanide pills, and I could not figure out the fastest, tidiest, and least terrifying way to kill myself. Not that I was suicidal, just that I was attempting to plan ahead for every possible scenario that could be worse than sudden death. And he looks at me and nods and agrees that it would not be fun to have radiation poisoning and I wonder when my neuroticism stopped feeling so strange, when more people reacted with total understanding than puzzled concern.

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Just after Thanksgiving, I begin attending a 10-step support group for dealing with climate anxiety. The week we work on the step about confronting our own mortality, I skip the evening’s Zoom discussion. I do not need to think about and come to terms with my own mortality. I have thought of my own death often, perhaps too much, in gruesome flashes and unwelcome visions. It used to be all the usual suspects: I’m pushed onto the subway tracks; my plane goes down; the car crashes on my way home for a visit with my family. I slip and fall in the shower; a bus hits me; I get caught in a rip tide on a sunny day and swept out to sea. The Lincoln Tunnel collapses; someone mugs me; the Uber driver abducts and assaults and dismembers me upstate. But in the past few years, they’ve been joined by a host of more plausible scenarios: Flash floods and hurricanes, tornadoes and heat waves, snowstorms and high winds. Thinking about death is something I need to do less of, not more.

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I did not ask to live in this time. This is not the world I expected—or felt entitled—to inherit. It brings me no pleasure to feel as if I am living through society’s going out of business sale where everything is expensive and nothing is well made. I do not enjoy feeling despondent. I should put my phone down and go to sleep, read the news less and pick up a good book more, bundle up and go walk outside. But I cannot look away from the world in which I live imploding in real time, cannot pull away from having access to witness destruction with just a few clicks. The revolution may not be televised, but the disaster certainly will be. Who among us knows how to turn it off?

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