the shift to vibes

things right now 66—7.21.26

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The Shift to Vibes or Nick Catucci's 'vibe shift' roundtable

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It's been five years since I diagnosed the vibe shift, and in that time I've been approached innumerable times about what is the new vibe. Were we in a vibecession? Were the vibes shifting left and against the right? Was there a Kamala vibe shift? An anti-Trump vibe shift? Had woke returned, shifting the vibes once and for all?

Something I've noticed over these last five years is that vibes, like presidential elections, happen at the margins — and the shifts, like the political narratives that come in every election's wake, are attempts at making the marginal general. Trump may have won the popular and the electoral votes in November 2024, but did his 1.5% margin of victory really give him a sweeping mandate?

The big swings, like Reagan's blowout election in 1984, or the death of disco, just don't happen anymore. Even vulgar decade-ism feels inadequate to describe our present — though this may be more an artifact of our ability to see clearly congealed decades retrospectively, not when we are in the midst of them.

Vibes have become our preferred unit of measurement because they work well to describe a culture that is in the process of fragmenting. Vibe shift worked well to describe the moment millennials handed the baton to Gen Z as the stewards of youth culture because Gen Z will likely be the last generation to remember any semblance of a mainstream, just as millennials are the last generation to remember a time before the internet.

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