I have spent the last month watching Jackass, playing Halo, and listening to The Strokes. It’s 2001 in my head right now and that’s okay — great, even, because I like doing all of those things. It makes me happy to go sit in a theater alongside other aging millennials and watch Johnny Knoxville get reamed by a bull. It feels…right.
That’s why, when I read trend pieces like The Cut’s recent “A Vibe Shift Is Coming,” I often feel like I am trying to interpret Simlish. For example, I have no idea what a Red Wing boot is — or was, I guess? — but apparently the footwear typified an entire micro era of New York City culture that has since been lost to time.
I’m not here to clown on the Cut writer — you can find plenty of that on Twitter — because I do have empathy for her: Getting older sneaks up on you.
That’s what these so-called “vibe shifts” are really about: people younger than us are making the culture now, leaving we old crones to decide whether we want to spend the rest of our limited time playing catch-up when we could just be ourselves instead.
The tricky part is that the culture passes us by faster than we realize. Before we know it, capital has sets its sights on younger, hungrier people who are willing to spend more on consumer goods and concert tickets to lend themselves an imprimatur of coolness; meanwhile, the over-thirty crowd gets sucked into mortgages and auto loans, all of us paying for what feels like survival of different sorts.
Culture isn’t just some ethereal layer of pretty trappings that sits on the surface of life; rather, it’s deeply enmeshed with money. The manufacturers of hip shoes don’t get nearly as large a return on investment going after 40-year-olds as they do selling to 20-year-olds who will feel like a pariah if they don’t have a pair.
Those shifts happen with all the wrenching suddenness of the market. One day you’re in the 18-34 demographic advertisers crave — and what is a “vibe,” really, but a rough consensus between marketing agencies? — and the next day you’re not.
That’s how something like the “When We Were Young” Festival can get announced and simultaneously cause millions of Bright Eyes listeners — *raises hand* — to think, Wait, I’m not young anymore? (No, we are not. Say hello to nostalgia marketing!)
When the pandemic began I was still technically in my “early thirties,” and now I am decisively in my “mid-thirties,” realizing that I didn’t just miss a “vibe shift,” but two whole years (and counting) of what could have been my first financially stable taste of adulthood. That’s a lower order concern compared to all the other grief and pain I am carrying with me out of the COVID-19 pandemic, but it’s not nothing.
So I get it. The vibe has shifted. (Or it’s shifting. Or it’s going to shift. Whatever.) But what you’re really saying when you diagnose a “vibe shift” is that we all aged a fair amount while siloed in our apartments, houses, and bedrooms, losing time we’ll never get back — and it’s only dawning on us now that we lost touch with the culture overnight.
But maybe that’s better than feeling it slowly slip out of our fingers, bit by bit. Because at least it makes the cultural choices stark: Do you want to find out who Frances Forever is? Or do you just want to re-listen to Is This It?
I’ll still let new things reach me through osmosis — and through my work as an entertainment editor — but it is liberating to let go of the pressure to stay relevant to maintain some sort of social capital. I’m going to keep sending people reaction GIFs and pointing out whenever Belle and Sebastian plays over the loudspeaker at Anthropologie and I may not be very cool anymore, but I won’t be trying.
OK, OK. I will part my hair down the middle, though. I’m not a grandma yet.