Vibe check on 2023
Iam dining at The Vibe, the recently opened all-day brunch restaurant in San Diego’s trendy Normal Heights neighborhood. What’s the vibe here? Ineffably of the moment! From the rubric “Lunch Vibes” (subtitled: “Cuz I woke up late. Sleeping in is self care, baby!”) I choose a bowl of “Voluptuous Greens” to honor the California vibe.
Vibes now dominate the whispering of the spheres, whether it be the will-o’-thewisp “vibecession,” the ongoing obsession with “vibe shifts,” or the omnipresence of “vibe checks,” which Google intends to integrate into its neighborhood search function soon. Vibes are the perfect metric for this moment in the first quarter of the 21st century — lazy, vaporous, essentially meaningless.
There’s a war vibe that has taken over the Middle East, I can feel it. God forbid I should inform myself about the situation.
“Vibecession” is the specter from which 2023 is still struggling to awake. In early August, public radio’s “Marketplace” show asked, “Are we finally exiting the ‘vibecession’?” Just two weeks later the august Financial Times fretted “Is the vibecession really over?” Maybe not. A month after that, The Washington Post warned that the corpse might rise from the crypt: “Risks Are Growing of a Double-Dip ‘Vibecession.’ ”
Why let a nebulous clickbait opportunity die a natural death?
Financial writer Kyla Scanlon coined the word “vibecession” in a column that tried to explain the fundamental unknowability of how Americans experience inflation: “The only certainty is uncertainty,” she wrote, “the only conviction is the lack thereof, and the only path forward is with a blindfold.”
Don’t think I am insensitive to last year’s many “vibe shifts.” (“Will any of us survive it?” New York magazine’s The Cut famously asked.) Sean Monahan, credited with coining the term, felt the vibes shifted once COVID19 was tamed: “If the vibe shift felt more disjunctive than usual, our inability to experience street life for more than a year was probably the culprit,” he wrote in The Guardian.
But it turns out a vibe shift can refer to, well, anything. For instance, “the ongoing pivot from growth to value in the stock market,” according to the Evening Standard newspaper (“The Bank of England has been wrong-footed by the vibe shift in the economy.”)
The importance of detecting vibe shifts has prompted Google to enhance its neighborhood search with the above-mentioned, AI-powered, “vibe checks.” I can spare them the trouble for my particular suburb — Double Dubuque; abandon hope all ye who enter here.
Because all things are possible on the internet, I decided to indulge in a personal “vibes check.” The wikiHow website offers a comprehensive, personalized examination self-administered in the privacy of your home, called “What Vibe Do I Give Off ?” The questions can be daunting, e.g., “If you could be any celebrity for a day, who would you be?” Samuel Johnson wasn’t on the list, so I opted for Jennifer Lawrence, who, compared with the other choices — Lindsay Lohan, Robert Pattinson, and Chris Evans — gives off a pretty relaxed vibe.
“You have a chill vibe,” the website informed me, “The universe has a plan for you, so why worry? … You’re as cool as a cucumber, letting even the most embarrassing moments slide off your back. Your friends say it’s a gift, you call it ‘whatever.’ ”
Whatever.
When you tune in to the correct frequencies, suddenly everything is a vibe. You’d have to say that Rudy Giuliani is throwing off a pretty guilty vibe these days. Harvard University seems deeply enmeshed in a nothingto-see-here vibe, which feels congruent with the “I think we are done here” vibe you experience every time you see a picture of New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick scowling on the sidelines.
Speaking of which, we really are done here. Let’s do our best to dodge the ominous vibes in our future, and best wishes to all for a happy and relaxing end of year.