Has The Economy Changed, Or Have We?

Thoughts on why things feel different

I’ve been thinking about something lately. A lot of people in writing/journalism/commentary jobs, and more broadly people who are part of shaping narratives on social media which then get picked up by news and opinion writers, are roughly my age.

A lot of us basically sort of definitively entered adulthood during the pandemic. I wonder if this one of the sources of the “vibecession” narrative and this feeling that things are just somehow not quite right. In other words, what’s “not quite right” is that we’ve grown out of some of our flexibility and carefreeness and are blaming the pandemic for the discontents of full adulthood.

I graduated from my master’s program in 2017; in early 2020, when the pandemic hit, I still sort of felt like a recent graduate. The whole lifestyle of being a (financially comfortable) student—hopeful feelings about your future career, spending (some of) your parents’ money when you went out, going out to eat in groups, staying out late, having lots of unstructured free time but also lots of social activities—I still remembered that all enough in February 2020 that it felt like I could still almost reach out and touch it.

Even though I got a job right out of school, it still, as late as 2020, felt a little weird to have a boss—someone less accommodating, and less interested in my success, than a professor—and to show up to the same place at the same time every day and do the same work.

The pandemic years basically represented the time during which student life receded from my memory and my sense of what’s possible.