Come Vibe With Me

My thoughts on the economy, inflation, and why nothing feels quite right

I’ve been thinking about this whole thing—why things feel off coming out of the pandemic; whether the so-called “vibecession” is real, and if so, what is the nature of it—for awhile. I’ve had a few thoughts that I’ve elaborated here at this newsletter.

One is that people are reacting to the combination of pure, monetary inflation along with the harder-to-quantify deterioration of customer service, store organization, dining out experience, etc.:

Recently, the employees in Lowe’s will just look an item up on their phone for the location if you ask where something is. (If my phone signal came in well in my local Lowe’s, which for some reason it doesn’t, I could look it up too.) I had a guy there tell me he’d “have to call someone” to find something, and then go back to his work and not call anyone. But I assume these employees are minimally trained and minimally paid, and in some cases just literally don’t have the time to do the full job.

Restaurants, now inundated with online orders and in-person dining, feel more bare and transactional. The notion that there is hospitality involved has been attenuated. A well-run, fully staffed operation creates a kind of magic. Things just work. But everywhere you see or sense these stress cracks—this deterioration.

But speaking of thrift stores, here’s what has been for a long time my favorite thrift store. In all the years and many dozens of visits here, I have never, ever seen this store so messy. It looked like a hoarder’s basement. More stuff than usual was missing price tags (free?).

(The Lowe’s thing is funny. I was looking for an item in the store that I’d searched online for, and the location the website gave was wrong (yes, I had the right store pulled up.) So I asked an employee where the item was, and he said aisle 21. I looked around for aisle 21 and couldn’t find it. So I asked another employee, who pointed to aisle 24 and looked kind of quizzically at it and said, “That’s aisle 21…? Hold on.” She walked me over to a third employee, who I asked “Where’s aisle 21?”, to which he said “What are you looking for?” I’m looking for aisle 21, buddy. Eventually I found it. I would have thought employee training included the basic layout of the store.)

I don’t mean by any of this that I feel entitled to excellent cheap labor, because obviously labor costs are going up. There are some cost increases and inconveniences that may come with that, and I’m good with that. But that’s not to say that things won’t feel a little bit unsettled or dislocated while we figure out how a lot of things work in a world of permanently higher service-worker wages.

My other little piece on this was more inward looking: young people like me are four years older since all this went down. We’re older and closer to, or completely in, true-blue adulthood. Maybe what we perceive as everything out there being less exciting/engaging/fun/etc. is really us having grown out of the unattached lifestyle we got used to in our 20s:

I’ve found myself, like a lot of people say they have, less interested in doing stuff. Less excited or enthusiastic about things.

A lot of us blame the pandemic: things are expensive, places closed, we avoid big crowds, etc. Obviously there’s truth to all that. But I wonder how much of it is basically just that we’re four years older and are now definitively adults. Maybe adults just don’t get giddy excitement over doing those things. At 30, you don’t feel quite as spry as 25; your metabolism runs a tad slower; you’re more aware of money and risk (that’s why I always second-guess myself driving close to an hour to go try some buffet.) The idea that alcohol is actually not good for you, much less drinking too much, eating “drunk food” at midnight, and trying to wake up the next morning—feels more real to you.

I think all of this is part of what’s going on. But I have a few further thoughts on my much longer and more thought-out answer to this question. My latest, longest answer to the puzzle of the “vibecession” was that yes, the phenomenon is absolutely real, but that it has little to do with inflation or even the economy per se.

My theory is that we’ve essentially latched onto an economic idea—inflation—to describe the economic, social, and emotional fallout of losing more than one million Americans in less than four years. The “economy” is downstream of people, routines, knowledge. It isn’t a machine you can turn on and off. In fact, even when you look at machines, and all their parts and maintenance and quirks, they’re not even things you can quite turn on and off.

Conservatives claim to understand this, and it was a major reason they opposed lockdowns and business closures. Yet the effect of losing so many hundreds of thousands of people—skewing older, i.e. people who hold the most embodied knowledge about their workplaces and companies and industries—is that an incredible amount of hard-earned, particular, “tacit knowledge” was simply lost. Why do so many things out there seem like shades or imitations of themselves, somehow not exactly the same?

Because nobody knows how exactly to do them just so anymore.

All of this comes down to one word: continuity. (I wrote a short bit on this, too.) The pandemic broke all of our continuities with how things were done. The inertia or momentum (opposite terms, maybe) that animate our routines—we do this because we do it—was broken. Think about this:

Think about the people who eat or drink a particular thing every day for years, and then the local store they usually grab it from closes. After a few days of going without, they often find that what was previously a craving simply disappears. Or consider when you move to a new house or apartment, and suddenly you throw things away for the move that have sat in the same spot for years in the old place. In the new place, you might not sit down to watch TV at the same time, or at all; your cat might not lounge on the same sofa anymore. You find that breaking that continuity—I do this, because I do it—changes your habits.

This is what happened to all of us and everything.

Almost every single routine was disrupted, in every single household and business and institution. Almost every continuity with pre-pandemic life was broken. Resuming is never quite the same as never pausing. Stopping a thing changes it forever.

I’ve used this idea of continuity in other contexts too, comparing it to the Catholic doctrine of apostolic succession. What that doctrine states is basically that bishops must ordain bishops, in a proper way (with the physical laying on of hands) and that this process can and must be traced back to the original apostles. None of that has to matter to you if you’re not Catholic! But I find it interesting because it suggests that the continuity of practice and belief is not just a matter of agreement but a matter of actual continuity. To me, it’s analogous to training a new hire off a manual, versus training him on the floor, learning all the little quirks and workarounds and tips that are literally not knowable without hundreds or thousands of hours of actual experience. Which, again, is what the pandemic wiped out.

In other words, that Catholic conception of apostolic succession expresses something true about human nature and human society. It’s almost like we’re trying to reverse-engineer or reinvent society as it existed in 2019, because it literally does not exist anymore, and cannot ever exist again.

It seems to me that all of this is deeply, fundamentally conservative, and so it has been mystifying to me why so few conservatives took this tack, instead insisting that we reopen the economy ASAP. When it came down to it, they chose the economy, or, perhaps even worse, some of them chose a selfish conception of religion in which their personal need for church gave them permission, in their minds, to put everybody else at risk.

We were handed a chance to slow down the pace of life; to put the family, and time with our kids, above our jobs; to walk more places, to spend less money, to enjoy more quiet; to consider how little we needed so much of the junk we bought; to prove that in between the government and the individual were the private institutions and the communities which could come together when things mattered. We got none of that.

Instead we got a brand new culture war and a widened gulf between so many different groups of Americans: urban dwellers versus rural folks, manual workers versus knowledge workers, single and childless people versus parents and families, religious people versus secular people, and of course liberals and conservatives. Everyone came away with their own story, but all the stories trace the same division, fear, and suspicion.

Some people were scandalized by the pandemic because they thought they watched a free country temporarily descend into coercive nanny-state groupthink; because they saw mass protest endorsed, and rioting and arson excused, even as they were barred from churches and hospital rooms and funeral halls. These grievances are not illegitimate.

But some other Americans were scandalized by something else: by watching half the country shrug at a rapidly rising death toll; watching people show more fury over being asked to wear a mask or to tip a service worker at 20 percent than over watching hundreds of thousands of preventable and unnecessary deaths.

That first group may feel that normal life has been rendered precarious by the ever-present possibility of another economic shutdown for some future crisis. But the second group wonders how it is possible to return to normal life, knowing that half the country didn’t, and wouldn’t, endure one single slight inconvenience to save your life? Which is to say, how do you forgive and forget the fact that half of your fellow citizens would not care, in theory or practice, if you were dead? Though for wildly different and contradictory reasons, we all feel that we have been put on notice.

The pandemic was not a pestilence sent by God to punish a disobedient people. But the pandemic could be seen as a test—a test of our solidarity, a test of our principles, a test of our values and priorities. I’m not sure we passed.

I understand the problems with some of what was done, especially with the interminable school closures, and the gulf between people who were able to work from home and those who were not. There are a lot of real and legitimate grievances with the public health reaction. But this is not an issue where I pull punches. I’m mostly just struck by how little the pandemic-related commentary has actually acknowledged the effect of the death toll, and how little we’ve considered how the disappearance of knowledge and experience will impact all sorts of things down the line. Like it never even happened. But the “vibecession” is happening because we know, on some level, that it did.

---

Related Reading:

Breaking the Fever

Don’t Trad On Me

Home From Italy, Thank God

---

Thank you for reading! Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter. You’ll get a weekly subscribers-only piece, plus full access to the archive: over 1,000 pieces and growing. And you’ll help ensure more like this!