The vibe shift is here (almost)
Take a deep breath.
It’s been less than a month since I started really writing this blog in earnest, but it was inevitable that sooner or later I was going to write about the vibe shift. Like.. this whole blog experiment is just me writing on the internet, so on some level, what else is there to write about except vibes, you know?
So to the extent that any of us even knows what we’re talking about when we say “vibe shift,” I think it’s fun to look ahead and try to discern what the summer (or the rest of the year) (or the next three to five years) holds. The Cut article I linked above says that mid-aughts American Apparel sleaze is coming back in a big way, and if we’re all going to be wearing deep v’s and trucker hats and low-rise faded wash skinny jeans, I guess I can get behind that.1 (Although I always thought trucker hats were dumb, tbh. I would sit that part out).
But more than just figuring out what fashion will look like in the near future, I think the “vibe shift” idea gets at something more fundamental. “Vibes” is more than just the latest popular music, TV, and fashion, right? It encompasses what we do. So it includes brunch and concerts and festivals and trips to far away places and house parties and big, messy, chaotic friend groups and smaller tight-knit friend groups and shared attitudes about politics and all of it. January 2017 was a definite vibe with protests-not-brunch and Resistance wine moms. All of 2020 was a vibe — Spring that year was so fucking dark and also empty and just stripped of everything except tv and the grocery store and zoom chats and the occasional home workout for sanity’s sake, only to be followed the rest of the year by muted, low-key hangouts, feeling constant guilt or unease about seeing (just a few) friends, and events being canceled and trips not really happening.
Needless to say those weren’t great vibes. Maybe those are bad examples. Because now we’re approaching something more like ordinary time, and we still have to wrestle with what the new vibe is. Speaking at least for myself, I think that necessarily includes some baseline anxiety that comes with getting just a little bit older and wanting to know if I’ve still got it. Put another way — now that we’re going to be out in the world and living again — am I still capable of keeping pace enough so that my life will look at least a little bit enviable to some people? Obviously to some extent this is a loaded question that’s hugely dependent on age. I have no idea what the average 19-25 year old zoomer is up to these days, and I mean, whatever. I’m glad they’ve got their thing. But among the age cohorts I do care about — (we all know who we are) — it’s still important that I .. I don’t know. Seem vaguely hip. I want people to see me as someone who does things. I don’t want to come off as lame or sad or self-conscious. This is 90% of the reason social media exists, isn’t it? — to help alleviate this anxiety by showing how much fun we are and then, obviously, to fuel that anxiety in the first place?
And so it is that another summer comes up on the horizon, and I get excited for warm weather and for outdoor street festivals and days at the beach and pride weekends and dance parties on the roof deck .. but at the same time I also start to think, “how much longer can I / we / any of us keep this up?” “Am I still as energetic and go-hard as I was at 35? Or 30?” (clearly, yes! but also, obviously not). If I wear this cropped tank and these short shorts and paint my nails, does it look fun and cool, or does it look like an old man who’s kidding himself? Admittedly, the universe of people wearing crop tops who also have grey at their temples pretty small. But.. that’s ok, right? That universe is growing! Surely that just makes me more of a bad ass, that I don’t care, and I’m the one who makes it cool for people my age to do «x thing» because everyone else my age is stuck having less fun than I am?
So, yeah. I think this is what it means to be caught up in the vibe shift. Amidst all the change, I still want to know that I’m contributing to the energy of what’s new and what’s exciting, i.e., / the ~vibe~ / in some way. I want to make sure I haven’t been somehow sidelined and made irrelevant.2 Of course, I can’t discount the possibility that I’m primarily motivated by the need to capture a lost youth that was dutifully spent doing other more responsible things.3 If I feel like I’m better at being fun now than I was 10 years ago, then that’s reason enough to lean in and say yes — I’m confident enough and self-assured enough to act in the way I wish my younger self had known he could have acted. At any rate, I don’t mean to overthink social adventures or crop tops and mesh tanks or any of the aggressive fashion/culture/style flexes that are just out there if you care to embrace them. The vibe grows stale and tired if you think too much about the vibe. Whatever is coming next will be new and fresh and different, and it will be our job to take it in stride. Like so much of life, vibes are both all around you, imposed by the outside world, but also defined by your own actions and your own way of embracing said vibe.
But anyway. I didn’t mean for this post to be quite so introspective and hand-wringy. As far as the general ~vibe~ is concerned, I think it’s fair to say that two years of the pandemic thoroughly killed whatever vibe existed previously. But pandemic era vibes (if not covid itself) are really and truly over, and there’s no longer an excuse or a crutch to be had there. Life might just ramp up to the frenzied, frantic pace that we all took for granted in the beforetimes, and it might happen very soon. And I guess I just want to say, whatever’s about to come our way, I hope I and the people I know and love are able to embrace it and feel excited about our lives and the choices we make. Spring, I’m coming to realize, can be such a hard time of year. It seems everyone I talk to is stressed out, anxious, doubting themselves, unsure if the next few months are just gonna go right or not. I know it almost sounds like a religious faith to say as much - but there is a vibe to be had out there. And it touches us in our professional and social lives and in our relationships. It takes a certain courage and energy to really get out there and embrace it. So here’s looking forward to us doing that.
I have so many deep v’s stuffed somewhere way in the back of my closet. You don’t even know.
To be fair, I want to acknowledge that if you’re busy raising kids, you’re probably not thinking about any of this. If you see yourself primarily as splitting time between your job and being a parent, this doesn’t leave much (or any) time for thinking about vibes. At best, you might have a front-row seat to hear about what other people are doing, and your own contribution to vibes is pretty constrained. But I’m already way out over my skis talking about parenting life, so I won’t presume to know any more than that.
More on this in another post, surely. But if I was ever going to write a novel it would be about this definite thing among millennial 30-somethings who were overly high-achieving and dutiful about grad school and career and such through all of their 20s.. only to to get to the 30s and say, wait a minute — if this is all there is to being an “adult,” and for reasons too complex/painful/wonderful to fully comprehend, I don’t have all the anchors of adulthood that my parents had at this age — I’m at least going to have fun while I still can. I’ve been subsisting for 12 years in this space now (yes, the 12th year of my 30s, if you will). So I think I know what I’m talking about.
Glad to see Mayor NoFun made the cut for this article. Any guess on what the next fashion vibe is going to be? I was waiting for that gem, but all I got was concern that we might be getting old.