The vibes are omnipresent

Winds in the east. Mist coming in. Like something is brewing about to begin. If you can feel it in the air, you already know what I’m referring to. The vibes… The vibes are all around us.

Amorphous and ephemeral, vibes are how we have begun to define all events, from political regime changes, to rebrands and mood shifts. Demure might have been named 2024’s word of the year (ugh… fine, I guess), but it should have been ​“vibes”.

When Trump was re-elected in November, it was branded the result of a ​“vibe shift” that had been percolating in the psyche of Americans since the pandemic. When Jaguar unveiled a pink-hued attempt to appeal to millennials, it was quickly shot down by the internet as a poor attempt at a vibe shift. Just a week later, Troye Sivan became the perfect embodiment of our lust for vibes when Smirnoff appointed him their first ever Chief Vibes officer.

Our obsession with vibes isn’t anything new per se, but as a neologism, it’s reached a saturation point. Vibes are so much a part of our cultural lexicon that they’ve become not just how we describe what is happening now, but how things might change in the future, and how they shifted from the recent past.

Where once we had eras, now we have tectonic vibes-based shifts. In February 2022, Allison P. Davis published an essay in The Cut where she announced ominously that ​“a vibe shift was coming”. The article, which went viral, identified a cultural change in the air, something that sat uneasily between hedonism and domesticity; people were partying more, but also wondering whether they should move to homesteads, get pregnant and become tradwives. After months on end locked inside our own homes during the pandemic, nobody was quite sure how to act when they emerged into real life again. We just weren’t sure what the vibes were.

Two years on, it’s this lingering uncertainty, this lack of ability to truly define the cultural mood that has led to our continuing obsession with vibes-based discourse. Much of what Davis identified in her essay has already come to pass: the return of smoking, the return of indie sleaze, the return of irony, hedonism and Ugg boots. The only one of them that’s had real staying power is the vibe itself, amorphous and omnipresent. The vibe is applied to every situation, every outcome, every plan for the future. ​“Is this a vibe?” we ask ourselves, our thumb hovering in the distance like one of the twin emperors in Gladiator II.

Our tendency to lean towards describing everything as ​“good vibes” or ​“bad vibes” is not an accident – it reveals an discomfort with ourselves, our political reality, and even our own opinions. Davis was right: irony did return. Gen Z in particular are often associated with a kind of ​“meta-irony” that some say is simply a fear of showing sincerity (others think it’s a coping mechanism for an increasingly absurd world).

Take the case of Luigi Mangione. The idea of a hitman killing the head of a medical insurance company captivated us – even before we found out he was really hot. And since his arrest, Mangione has become a sort of folk hero. TikTok is awash with compilation videos of Mangione, topless, or his mugshot, set to Britney Spears’s Criminal. He’s the subject of jokes on SNL and USA Today. His following has been described as a ​“dark fandom” here in the UK, but that’s not quite right.

It’s more accurate to say that we define Luigi as a ​“vibe”, a kind of talisman for everything we think is wrong with ​“the system”. The kind of people who might recoil at the term ​“class-based solidarity” would undoubtedly feel more comfortable to express their class-based solidarity through the medium of jokes and shitposting.

In the UK, we’ve been taking a ​“vibes based approach” to our politics for the past few years. In 2022, one article in the Financial Times pitted then-incumbent leader, now ex-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak against the perennially vibeless Liz Truss. Sunak’s politics might have been right wing, but his vibe was liberal, more tech-bro than Bullingdon Club – he liked Taylor Swift and SoulCycle, and appealed to voters who didn’t quite know why. Two years on, Sunak’s successor, Kemi Badenoch, cannot escape the vibes-based discourse. A New Statesman review of her first go at PMQs described her performance as both a ​“vibe shift” and, later, a ​“not a vibe that Labour can allow to solidify”. Politics has become, on a base level, about ​“vibes and tribes”.

Labour has not heeded that warning. Keir Starmer, for his part, has not been a vibe. In fact his grey, vibeless aura has defined his first few months in office. Every Starmer event is an awkward and vibeless disaster, from turning on the Christmas tree lights outside Number 10 to calling for the ​“return of the sausages”. It’s easy to laugh at them, but it’s not useful. For every sneering article about his robotic blunders, there could be 10 about his neoliberal attacks on the benefits system many of his constituents need to exist, or perhaps his complete failure to address the prospect of Irish reunification. But alas, neither of these things are ​“vibes”, and thus we ignore them for more vague and nebulous criticisms.

In the US, where the youth vote was more important than ever, we saw an election dictated largely by vibes and satire. In fact the only dent the doomed Democrats made in Republican armour was when they started calling them ​“weird”. ​“He’s just a strange, weird dude”, Tim Walz said of Donald Trump’s vibe.

The Harris-Waltz presidential bid was, if we’re brutally honest, a campaign that attempted to run entirely on vibes. Their social team was prolific on TikTok, Harris was the subject of almost as many fan-cams as Luigi Mangione, her laugh became a meme in itself. At her best, Harris could take bad vibes and turn them into assets, like her reclamation of the once cringey ​“coconut tree” line. But none of it translated into real-life success. Harris might have been a FYP page fave, but Trump was able to communicate directly to his voters – young men who turned out for him, ironically, because they liked his vibe.

Harris’s vibes-based campaign dovetailed with the success of Charli xcx’s Brat. But despite an endorsement, and prominent use of the album’s iconography and music, the Harris campaign couldn’t capitalise. Charli xcx’s Brat-era messiness was real. Harris’ reeked of being created by a think-tank focus group full of Georgetown grads. One was a vibe, the other was not.

Obviously, the Democrats lost. Calling the Republicans weird, as it turns out, wasn’t enough, partly because it didn’t mean anything tangible. As an insult, ​“weird” was funny but it was also semantically lazy – Walz and Harris didn’t bother to sharpen their critique. Perhaps they should have defined weird as an obsession with other people’s genitalia, or watching dolphin porn, or having brain worms inside your head which tell you to ban fluoride. But they didn’t – and paid the price.

No longer do we feel comfortable describing things in an actually useful way; as ​“exciting” or ​“unjust” or ​“poignant” or ​“frustrating” or ​“kind” or ​“beautiful” or ​“immoral”. Instead these things become either ​“good vibes” or ​“bad vibes”. Perhaps it’s because our political futures feel more uncertain than ever. If everything can change so dramatically every four or five years, then what’s the point in speaking in concrete terms? Or using concrete evidence? Why not rely on vibes instead? Why not rely, as the actual New York Times did, on reading the candidates auras on the eve of the election? What the hell, sure.

Because ​“vibes” have replaced universal truth, we’re left with a generation unsure of where to discover what’s real. A generation that has retreated towards traditionalism, perhaps as a result. Gen Z, it’s frequently pointed out, are more conservative than their generational predecessors. As one recent post about AOC removing pronouns from her bio and the actor Rebecca Hall defending Woody Allen puts it: a new vibe shift is coming.

Sean Monahan, who runs the Substack 8Ball and first identified the vibe shift Allison P. Davis wrote about all the way back in 2021, is still thinking about politics in terms of vibes. In one recent post he writes: ​“The vibe shift this time is a story about progressive millennials realising that when they declared total victory for their politics in 2020, it was a pyrrhic victory.” Monahan, it seems, views the election result as a vibes-based pushback against Bidenomics and policies, a click of an invisible shift. When the Democrats lost, it was because they ​“misread the public mood”. In other words, they got the vibe wrong.

It’s easy to feel fatigued with this. Vibe is now such a part of our cultural discourse, that much like ​“slay”, it’s become a hedging word, a way to fill the gap and describe something we like, or don’t.

The logical conclusion is vibe fatigue. ​“Vibes” and vibes-based discourse are fun and funny, but they’re also a cop out. They’re a way for us to communicate unease with our political class, with our future choices. They’re a way for us to talk about what we like and what we don’t like in a semi-ironic way; a side-eyeing of things that deserve earnest discussion.

But if everything is a vibe, if everything is measured on vibes, then the vibe becomes incoherent, ridiculous, useless. A vibe’s value lies in its lack of definition – that’s why it can be applied to everything from politics to cigarette sales and Troye Sivan’s commercial projects. But if it can be applied to everything, if it can define everything, then it means nothing. Surely that is not a vibe.