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It’s as if culture and global trend setters had been
hibernating these past two years but our pandemic release has caused an ennui
that no one can put their finger on.
There’s been a lot of chatter online describing this as a
“vibe shift,” and vain attempts to pin down what this means.
The phrase comes from Sean Monahan, a trendcaster
blogging at Substack. A trendcaster, or trend forecaster, is someone who has
made a career of translating cultural trends for a larger audience. (Monahan
also coined the term “normcore,” a fashion trend that embraces unpretentious,
average-looking clothing as a way of subverting conventions about hipness, in
the same way that “mumblecore” means cute, low budget, dialogue-heavy indie
films like those made by Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach.)
Anyway, journalist Allison Davis picked and ran
with Monahan’s idea and her piece for The Cut went viral.
She describes “vibe shift” as when, “In culture, sometimes
things change, and a once-dominant social wavelength starts to feel dated,” and
then worries whether she’s caught the new wave or is kind of condemned to miss
out.
Like Monahan (who is 35), Davis is a self-described
“geriatric millennial” who worries that she’s no longer young and hip enough.
“It’s chilling to realize you may be one of the stuck, or if
you aren’t, you may be soon… I haven’t stopped thinking about my own survival
odds since.”
Where Davis and Monahan are right is in identifying that the
pandemic has hit pause on life, or at least put things into slo-mo.
“That while some of us were inside, or in the world but
social distancing, or just keeping to ourselves as best we could, culture
wasn’t really moving forward,” Davis says. “I didn’t feel acute FOMO. It was
nice that everyone was sort of stagnant, watching the same trash on Netflix.
Sure, some people were going out ‘secretly,’ but we didn’t really know what
those people were up to, and we didn’t have reason to believe they were
advancing any sort of scene.”
In other words, the pressure to dress just right and talk
about just the right things has been taken off these past two years since the
world just stayed in.
“There’s been a real paranoia that people have,” Monahan
tells Davis in an interview. “Everyone coming out of hibernation being like,
What are people wearing? What are people reading? What are people doing? And it
was different than when everyone had gone into the pandemic. It unsettled a lot
of people.”
Now the lid has been lifted, the masks are off, the party can
resume. To some people — and what seems like the rest of the internet,
including sites like Bloomberg — that’s nightmare enough. Everyone
seems preoccupied with catching the new vibe — whether that’s wearing “American
Apparel, flash photography at parties, and messy hair and messy makeup,”
according to Monahan — the return of early-aughts indie sleaze.
This is trite stuff at the best of times and to be
completely fair to Monahan, Davis et al — they were writing all this in
mid-February.
Remember mid-February, when the world seemed like just a
normal kind of place where you could indulge in this kind of drivel?
Not any more. There is now something catastrophically deaf
about these words from
“I suggest that the death drive has something to do with it.
With the pandemic and climate change, our aesthetic and behavior are certainly
shaped by a sense of doom. There’s a nihilism to the way people dress and
party; our heels get higher the closer we inch to death,” Davis writes.
Mashable’s riff on the topic is equally insensitive, but
only in light of the events that smashed the world overnight a couple of weeks
later.
Yet, even though they didn’t mean it — because how could
they — there is a vibe shift. At least one felt in Europe, perhaps
less so thousands of kilometers away in North America — I’m not sure.
Russia’s war on Ukraine — on the whole of human rights and
at the heart of democracy — changes everything.
As happened with COVID, the compulsive need to keep up with
the Russian invasion is taking a toll on our mental health. The constant urge
to check up on bad news is called “doom scrolling.”
Dr. Dean Burnett, a neuroscientist at Cardiff university,
told The Guardian that the fact the crisis was still unfolding meant
people were experiencing a kind of perpetual cliffhanger that made it harder to
disengage.
“It would be great if you could just say, I don’t want to
engage with this Ukraine situation, because it caused my anxiety to spike. But
because of the way the world works now, you’re cutting yourself off. It’s a
lose-lose scenario,” he says.
In the same article, Juliet Landau-Pope, a productivity
coach from London, says she’s been searching out personal testimonies on
Twitter, trying to find different sources of information. “It’s the fact
everything has happened so quickly. It’s not a question of what’s happening on
a day-to-day basis, but hour by hour.”
She adds, “I’ve lost all inclination to socialize. It feels
too trivial.”
Everything, including anyone losing sleep over which sneaker
app to have open on a phone, is trivial in comparison.
The war cannot be contained; it is hard to compartmentalize,
and it is so hard to ignore because the sides are so clearly drawn.
As Tomasz Jagiello, CEO at Polish cinema chain Helios
Cinemas, told Celluloid Junkie last week, “Honestly, I forget about
COVID and the weekly results of my cinemas or windows. I feel like we are
witnessing a change in history. I don’t remember any moment where’s there been
such a clear line between bad and good. That’s why we all united to support the
good and we all admire the great Ukrainian nation.”
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