Culture

Junk Explained: What Is The ‘Vibe Shift’ And Why Is Everyone Talking About It?

The vibe never stopped shifting, we just don't usually notice it.

by Lavender Baj  17 February 2022
vibe shift

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New York Magazine’s The Cut has woken up today and chosen violence, this time, in the form of an apocalyptic-sounding article entitled ‘A Vibe Shift Is Coming, Will Any Of Us Survive It?’ And — like a tsunami warning after an earthquake — the cult website’s readers have heeded its warning.

The Cut’s article references a 2021 entry of the same name in the 8Ball SubStack, which predicts we are on the precipice of the next great vibe shift. So let’s unpack it all, shall we?

So What Exactly Is A Vibe Shift?

According to 8Ball’s Sean Mohan — who also founded trend forecasting group K-HOLE — we have seen four great vibe shifts in the 21st century so far: hipster/indie sleaze music (2003-2009), post-internet/techno revival (2010-2016), Hypebeast/woke (2016-2021), and the one we’re in now, apparently.

Despite its catchy title and subsequent 15 minutes of fame — thanks to The Cut — a vibe shift isn’t a new concept, and isn’t particularly hard to comprehend.

Basically, the ‘vibe shift’ is the cool term for what happens when the trends that once dominated social culture seemingly die overnight, and the “it girl” trend you wore yesterday suddenly makes you look a decade out of date. But it’s more than just fashion, it’s the music you listen to, the venues you frequent and the way you choose to spend your time. That’s vibes, baby — and they’re apparently shifting, again.

If you ask Mohan, the new vibe is about to get a lot more personal.

“I feel like the trajectory of the 2010s has been exhausted in a lot of ways,” Mohan told The Cut. “The culture-war topic no longer seems quite as interesting to people. Social media isn’t a place where you can be as creative anymore; all the angles are figured out. Younger people are less interested in things like quote-unquote cancel culture.

“These were kind of, like, the big pillars we used to navigate pop culture in the 2010s. And we had the rise of all these world-spanning, like, Sauron-esque tech platforms that literally have presences on every continent. People want to make things personal again.”

He also noted that trends like indie sleaze and the Tumblr aesthetic will probably make a comeback, as great and horrifying as that would be.

Maybe It’s A Vibe Shift, Or Maybe It’s A Trauma Response To The Pandemic

Everyone can feel it, the vibe definitely feels like it’s shifting. And whether you noticed it before it made front-page news in The Cut or not, you probably feel it now. But is the vibe shifting, or is this just a pandemic response?

In the interview with The Cut, Monahan noted that there seems to be a huge sense of instability as we exit our COVID-fuelled lockdowns.

“There’s been a real paranoia that people have. 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,” he told The Cut.

Thanks to COVID — and Australia’s many, many lockdowns — many of us are feeling like we’ve lost a huge chunk of our most prized years. Heck, my early 20s are slipping away faster than I can comprehend and instead of backpacking through Europe and spending all of my money on overpriced cocktails, I have spent the better part of the last two and a half years locked inside.

And now that we’re finally starting to come out the other side of the pandemic (touch wood), we’re re-emerging in society after cocooning ourselves in our apartments for two years and wondering what the fuck we’re supposed to do and — more importantly — if we even want to do it anymore.

Is The Vibe Shifting, Or Is This Just Growing Up?

If you’ve somehow managed to survive the last two and a half years without a major career or life trajectory shift, good for you, but you’re probably one of a small few. So is this a vibe shift, or is this just growing up?

When COVID first kicked off in Australia in early 2020, I was 21, I had just returned from a romantic trip to Japan with my then-boyfriend and in a matter of about two weeks, I was dumped and thrown headfirst into a pandemic. But instead of being able to navigate and explore my early 20s as a single woman galavanting around Melbourne, I spent the next two years predominantly inside.

Now verging on 24, I have been robbed of the opportunity to naturally evolve and have now been thrust back into society with no real idea what the fuck is going on.

So, while it may feel like the vibe is rapidly shifting, the reality is that we are in a perpetual state of shifty vibes and you’re probably just more acutely aware of it because we’ve all been so stagnant while locked in our homes.

The idea of trends changing is far from a new concept, it happens every few years like clockwork and every time we’ve experienced it previously, we’ve managed to survive. So perhaps it’s not the dreaded vibe shift that’s stressing everyone out, it’s simply coming to terms with the fact that we are not as young, or as cool as we were when the pandemic began. And that’s fine.

So…Will Any Of Us Survive The Vibe Shift?

If you’re worried about the impending ‘vibe shift’, I implore you to take one look at the term on Twitter — where users have already memed it into oblivion. I simply cannot stress enough just how much none of this matters.

Whether or not you seek to shift with the vibe, or away from it in a very Tumblr-esque attempt to reject the notion of trying to be cool, it truly does not fucking matter. Although if this means that we can go back to indie sleaze, I’m all for it.