I was in the middle of attempting to relearn which clothes I wore, how I pursued sex, what drugs I took and with whom, what music I danced to and where.

This vibe-shift idea landed right as I was trying to figure out what hot-girl summer - or hot vaxx summer or the whoring ’20s or however you chose to label the expected triumphant return - was supposed to be and who I was supposed to be in it. Like Ellen, I haven’t stopped thinking about my own survival odds since. It’s chilling to realize you may be one of the stuck, or if you aren’t, you may be soon.

Unfortunately, I ate this social analysis up with a big-ass spoon. And by that law, those who survived this shift only to get stuck in, say, Hypebeast/Woke - well, they’ve already moved to Los Angeles to houses that have room to display their sneaker collections worth a small fortune. They “bunkered down in Greenpoint and got married” or took their waxed beards and nautical tattoo sleeves and relocated to Hudson. The ones still clinging to authenticity and fairy lights are the ones who crystallized in their hipsterdom while the culture moved on. This is to say, not everyone survives a vibe shift. ‘Don’t you care about authenticity? What’s with all this sudden interest in branding!’ Now some did not make it through the vibe shift … ‘Why are you all wearing the same sneakers!’ they would plead. VIBE SHIFT! Everyone started wearing Nike Frees and sweating it out in the club. One day everyone was wearing Red Wing boots and partying in warehouses in Williamsburg decorated with twinkling fairy lights. None of this would have been particularly distressing (it’s just how time moves), if not for this paragraph explaining what the flocking looks like: You can see that he’s right something has shifted. It is unnerving because when you really consider it, you can feel people flocking to a new thing. You can argue the accuracy of Monahan’s timeline or spend hours over dinner litigating the touch points of each vibe era - it’s kind of fun debating which trend was peaking when, or which was just for white people - but the thing that struck fear into Ellen’s heart was Monahan’s prediction that we were on the cusp of a new vibe shift. 2016–20), or Drake at his Drakest, the Nike SNKRS app, sneaker flipping, virtue signaling, Donald Trump, protests not brunch.

2010–16), or the Blood Orange era, normcore, dressing like The Matrix, Kinfolk the club, not Kinfolk the magazine and Hypebeast/Woke (ca. 2003–9), or peak Arcade Fire, Bloc Party, high-waisted Cheap Mondays, Williamsburg, bespoke-cocktail bars Post-Internet/Techno Revival (ca. Monahan, who is 35, breaks down the three vibe shifts he has survived and observed: Hipster/Indie Music (ca. In other words, he’s someone who has made a career of translating cultural trends for a larger audience.Ī vibe shift is the catchy but sort of too-cool term Monahan uses for a relatively simple idea: In the culture, sometimes things change, and a once-dominant social wavelength starts to feel dated. Previously, Monahan had helped found the now-defunct art collective K-HOLE, known for giving a name to the 2010s phenomenon of normcore and succinctly explaining why all of a sudden everyone was wearing New Balance sneakers and dad jeans. She dropped a link to something titled “Vibe Shift,” an entry from a Substack called 8Ball, which turned out to be the weekly newsletter of a trend-forecasting consultancy founded by Sean Monahan. One morning in June, while I was puffing away on my stationary bike - fine, a Peloton - pretending I had enough time to get my body ready for the “hot vaxx summer” that never really was, my friend Ellen messaged me: “Okay, please let me know if this person is dumb.

Vibe check meme lady