Highlights From The Comments On Vibecession

[Original post: Vibecession - Much More Than You Wanted To Know]

Table of Contents

1: When was the vibecession?
2: Is the vibecession just sublimating cultural complaints?
3: Discourse downstream of the Mike Green $140K poverty line post
4: What about other countries?
5: Comments on rent/housing
6: Comments on inflation
7: Comments on vibes
8: Other good comments
9: The parable of Calvin’s grandparents
10: Updates / conclusions

1: When Was The Vibecession?

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Kyla Scanlon writes:

Hi! I’m the person who coined and first published this term. I’ve been studying this phenomenon for the past four years, so forgive the rather long comment! A quick factual clarification: the Vibecession began in 2022 as the sentiment–data divergence that opened up that summer is the real starting point. The decade before didn’t have the same shape of malaise, which you can see in the sentiment data you included. People who’ve also been working on this topic tend to focus on the same pressures you outlined like housing, education, measurement problems which are absolutely part of the story. Maybe this is what you meant by smoking gun, but the Vibecession has crossed into somewhat of a meaning-making crisis which shows up in collapsing trust and inconsistent reactions to the data. Every generation has one of these, but ours is flattened across all ages due to social media and those tighter economic constraints. Expectations around future stability collapsed at the same time institutions lost credibility, and that combination changes how people interpret even good data. Also the post-2020 political environment runs on performance and constant identity signaling, and economic sentiment gets lost in those dynamics, which is why the usual models don’t fully explain what’s going on. Finally, we really aren’t in one right now, as the economic data has deteriorated meaningfully and the negative sentiment is warranted at this point.

I appreciate this guide to the original intent of the word, but I claim ‘death of the author’ - it seems to me this is more than just a two-year problem. I remember people complaining about hellworld, the broken social contract, the Boomers tearing up the bridge behind them, vanishing opportunities for the young, the blackpill of modern life, etc, well before 2022. Memory can be faulty, but don’t we need something like this to explain the Trump campaign, the Sanders campaign, Chapo Trap House, Red Scare, 4chan, and ...