« The products of mass culture have learned to speak a new language: the language of the occult. Come in, an app pleads, and listen to an algorithmically curated playlist of songs that “fit the vibe.” It’s hard, a marketing email laments, to build an organization filled with people whose “energies align.” […]
Once, vibe, mood, and energy were watchwords of the counterculture. Among hippies, dropouts, and other assorted voyagers in psychedelia, they were part of a private shorthand for sensations strongly felt but not so easily explained. Today, this vocabulary has diffused beyond any niche group.
Still, it is possible to identify a sort of vanguard. Perhaps the most dedicated speakers of the language of the occult today are millennial and Gen Z denizens of social media platforms. For them — for us— it has become received common sense that some days “the vibes” are simply off; that everything from a weird-looking cat to a cargo ship stuck in the Suez Canal is a potential object of identification, an occasion for remarking, “Same energy,” or more tersely, “Mood” — which is to say, “That’s me!” Tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram users assemble collections of images and clips intended to produce a distinct impression, an overall mood or vibe: forest clearing, tweed jacket, roaring fire, marble bust.
Unlike the “invisible energies” that were [back in the day] supposed to join us together as “citizens,” [the modern] conception of energy tries to give a form to […] apparently disparate things. Less a metaphor for collective life and more a heuristic for sorting through a bottomless pile of independently generated but centrally stored content. […] There is no satisfactory and readily available account of how the simple non-act of scrolling through one’s feed comes to feel so nebulously miserable. In the age of the platform, energy, once a figure of utopian collectivity and mystical omni-connection, becomes a tool for making the most of our helplessness […]: projecting visions of cosmic sympathies onto the black boxes that organize and administer so much of contemporary life. […]
[Similarly,] vibe is primarily about the spread and creep of diffuse feelings through shared space. Afforded what feels like perfect access to a dizzying number of other persons, what they report to be thinking and feeling at any given moment, we have little choice but to take this data in aggregate, not as an accumulation of individuals’ joy and suffering but as a series of impersonal, thrumming emotional ground tones. These tones are often unpleasant, if only in a vague, formless way.
A scan of social media returns far more talk of bad vibes than good. All summer, apparently “the vibes were off” in New York City. On the occasion of a mass shooting, a professional player of video games pronounces: “Fucked vibes.” Popular TikTok accounts like “vibes.you.crave” post montages of vibey images — train platforms, snowy darkness — and users reply to report how existentially hollow these videos make them feel. “I feel empty and satisfied at the same time,” writes one commenter. “These pics makes me feel empty and in a way i can’t explain,” confesses another. […]
For young users on these platforms, the transcendental fucked-up-ness of the world does not register as a crisis, but as a vibe — a low-hanging miasma of ambient bad feelings. To invoke a vibe is to try to make this atmosphere a little more understandable, to gain enough distance from it to start to describe it.
If naming a vibe is a way to register the encompassing badness of things, there is also a sense that embracing a vibe might be a strategy for repairing this badness, or at least shutting it out. As good a catchphrase as any for this conviction is “no thoughts, just vibes.” […] It is a statement of only semi-ironic aspiration to return, as Freud put it long ago in his theorization of the death drive, to unthinking inorganic matter. […]
Even in its less extreme versions, “no thoughts, just vibes” is something like a mantra for depersonalization. Online, if it isn’t a selfie caption, the phrase often accompanies an image of a nature scene (sunset, dog in a meadow) or else a scene of debauchery (disco ball, handle of vodka). Drugs, mystical philosophy, the sublime in nature: pick your poison; all techniques of vibing are methods for getting momentary relief from the burdens of personhood, for relaxing the boundaries of the self in the name of finding a slightly less painful way of living in the world. There is a […] distance between these vibes and those of the midcentury counterculture. “No thoughts, just vibes” finds vibe shedding its sociability and its aspiration for extended sensation. It abandons shared feelings for private unfeeling. »
— Mitch Therieau, “Vibe, Mood, Energy | Or, Bust-Time Reenchantment”
