The “Vibecession” Was (And Is) Real, But It’s Not About The Economy
We don’t have the language for the pandemic’s social and emotional fallout
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Just a few months ago, there was no escaping all the “vibecession” talk. The term, coined by writer Kyla Scanlon in June 2022, was everywhere by late 2023: a national conversation about whether the national conversation was too pessimistic, whether the economy, inflation, and the “vibes” were all out of whack.
The numbers keep telling us that the economy is strong, or at least fine. Unemployment is way down. Wages are way up. The stock market is way up. After peaking in 2022, inflation has been easing. GDP is growing.
Yet many Americans were experiencing economic distress, or at least said they were. Confidence in the economy, although it has been climbing since October, remains low. News and opinion articles highlighting inflation remain common. Some of this griping is political, of course, and should be taken with a grain of salt. Some of it is based on the real difficulty at least some people always face in the American economy.
I’m convinced, however, that a lot of it is rooted in something real. The politics surrounding this discourse haven’t been terribly interesting. “Don’t talk about inflation, it might help Trump!” “Maybe we can get Biden on inflation!” (That went out the window in July, but Republicans will, of course, try to pin inflation, exaggerated or not, on Kamala Harris.) It’s difficult to see how a second Trump term could “fix” any of this, or, for that matter, how Biden broke it.
It was probably not possible to spend so much pandemic relief money and undergo a big pause in economic activity—not to mention the disruption to international supply chains—without some economic dislocation following the end of the crisis. And in any case much of that happened under Trump’s presidency.
Inflation is obviously really happening, though it isn’t, at least per my own experience, as severe as many would have you think. Some pundits dismissed almost all of it as anti-Biden grousing (it did seem that Biden stepping aside improved “the vibes”) or as a series of singular obsessions over some particular good that happened to be seeing a price spike (eggs, gas, etc.). But that doesn’t explain all of it. I was at a Safeway in suburban Silver Spring, Maryland looking at some cans and jars, and an African American lady in the aisle with me observed, “These prices, everything is so expensive!” She’s not very likely a Trump voter.
The most acute economic issue that might fall under a broad understanding of “inflation” is the deterioration of the dining out and customer service experience. Labor commands better wages post-pandemic—a good thing, altogether—which means businesses are hiring less, stretching out capacity, and cutting corners—a bad thing. The pandemic and the awful toll it took on service workers led many of the most talented and ambitious ones to seek better positions, leaving fewer experienced staff and less motivated entry-level workers in many of these positions.
There’s a class element to how we experience this, as some progressives have rightly pointed out—what workers experience as an increase in their labor value, spendy white-collar folks experience as a cut in their leisure and lifestyle. But poorer people go to the supermarket and the big-box store and the burger joint too, and perhaps a smooth, decent customer experience means even more to them.
All of this, however, is just some table-setting, and a bit besides the point. The whole real-or-not-real recession, or “vibecession” question—the feeling that something isn’t quite right—may not really be about inflation at all. “Inflation” is just a convenient, accessible term to reach for. It functions more as a byword for “things aren’t going well” than as a particular economic analysis. And if the economy is in fact going well, as it appears to be, what could explain the widespread perception or experience of hard times?
You know what will really throw your “vibes” off? More than a million of your fellow citizens dying in less than four years.
Alongside all of this economic discourse about what is presumably the post-pandemic economy, there’s another ongoing discussion about how the pandemic never ended, and that we merely accepted what would have once been an intolerable death toll, mostly among the old and vulnerable. While everyone’s chances have gotten better, and deaths and hospitalizations have fallen dramatically, COVID-19 can still very much be a non-trivial disease, and we’re seeing another spike in infections right now.
Pointing this out is now viewed as the domain of leftist internet scolds or special interests, which is how many view the elderly and disabled. But does anybody doubt that every American would have been shocked in February 2020 to see how this all unfolded? We are like Peter on the night Jesus was betrayed, denying that we would ever deny him and then, with a little peer pressure, folding.
But we are worse than Peter, because we did not weep when it happened.
Nobody really knew or knows what the right course was, back in that last normal month of February 2020. It probably wasn’t making fun, or impugning the character, of people for not visiting urban Chinatowns amid a transmissible disease that had spread out of central China. (That acknowledgement, or rather fact, in no way excuses the racism Asian Americans faced during the course of the pandemic. Obviously.)
It probably wasn’t a letter suggesting that because racism was a public health crisis too, it was acceptable to break lockdown to protest. (Though Anthony Fauci never expressed that opinion.) It probably wasn’t closing churches while decreeing big-box chain stores “essential,” or closing schools more or less indefinitely, either.
But what should public health policy actually have been? Conservatives today like to claim that everybody who supported lockdown wants to memory-hole it because they’re embarrassed at their failure. I don’t know about that. We had to do something. Contra a popular quasi-conspiracy theory, the “lockdown” wasn’t some authoritarian scheme just waiting for the right crisis. Legally, what we called “lockdowns” were shelter-in-place orders—the same orders routinely declared for blizzards, hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes. And school shootings.
What that suggests is that we all thought we would face a brief, acute crisis akin to a natural disaster or a terrorist attack. Once it became clear that this was going to be a long, grinding semi-crisis, we really had no better idea than to extend the shelter-in-place orders indefinitely, throwing in exceptions, uneven enforcement, and terrible communication for good measure.
One can err in both directions on this question. Taylor Lorenz, characterizing the advice that vulnerable people stay home as “social murder,” is a little overheated. But the people responding, “Well, what are we supposed to do?” are guilty of the opposite error.
What kind of question is that, really? We face seemingly impossible situations all the time—situations that demand time, care, money, sometimes more than we think we can give. A sick child or one with special needs; an ailing parent or grandparent. Do we throw up our hands and say What are we supposed to do? If you’re asking that question, you might know the answer. The fact is that, for many people, staving off hundreds of thousands of deaths just isn’t one of those things that calls us to solidarity and sacrifice.
A piece in City Journal from late last year, on the post-pandemic increase in crime, included a little bit that made me pause:
There is a link, definite but hard to define, between moral ugliness and the physical ugliness it feeds on and perpetuates. There is a disquiet that comes from realizing you live in the same city and neighborhood as people interested only in destruction. In late May 2020, I watched online as Minneapolis rioters reduced a 189-unit affordable-housing complex to smoldering ashes, burning the unfinished building down to its concrete foundation.
This echoes the broader phenomenon of conservatives becoming more skeptical, fearful, paranoid even, following the pandemic—as though they’d seen something that permanently altered their understanding of the country they live in. Leftists “stay woke”; rightists suddenly “know what time it is.” Post-pandemic, much of the right feels as though it has suddenly learned what time it is.
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.
And if it was not the case in 2020 or even 2021, it is obviously the case now that a thousand deaths really is a statistic. And who feels strongly about statistics?
Like those statistics showing a strong economy.
But—too many words in, perhaps—I don’t think either inflation or the political fallout of the contentiousness over public health policy fully explains what we’re going through. So what does explain the “vibecession”?
The fact is, while we’re not in a recession or even a particularly weak economy, we really are in a strange and different moment. One million people are dead. Yes, many of them were in nursing homes or hospice and didn’t have all that much time left. Many, however, were frail but basically healthy people. Many still worked, or volunteered, or participated in their local communities in some way. And many were much younger. Many were prime-age workers. Many left behind children. Many prime-age workers lost, or had to care for, a parent. They quit or changed jobs or moved.
Think of all the parents and grandparents who died. People who left behind—or who had hoped for—children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. Think of how many lives are more bare and empty now. The stress, the grief, the long-term illnesses? The millions of still-living people touched by—no longer touched by—the one million dead? What does that do to work ethic? To hopefulness about the future? The desire to go out and spend money and have fun?
What does it do to the birth rate? To the family as an institution? Most of the people who take it upon themselves to care about these matters have been absolutely silent on such questions—maybe the better word is omerta. How can a pro-life person be indifferent to this? I don’t mean this to make a point, to call social conservatives hypocrites. I mean it as much as anyone can mean anything.
In broad strokes, almost every individual saw almost every element of their routine lives altered or interrupted. Nothing in recent history—the Great Recession, Katrina, 9/11, Enron, Iraq, maybe not even Vietnam and its tumult at home—imposed this level of society-wide disruption. You would probably have to go back to World War II to find something emotionally, socially, and economically equivalent.
Think of all the little disrupted details. The restaurant by the office you go to with a coworker once a week, or order out from; the day you usually plan your meetings; the familiar people you can count on running into; the path you take to work, or bus you catch; the store you buy your groceries at, the groceries your store carries, the supplier your restaurant uses, the preferred brand of the tomato sauce or breadcrumbs or pasta; the recipes executed just so by a longtime chef; the people staffing factories and medical offices and stores, the managers who died or retired, and took decades of canny, grounded experience with them that can never be exactly replicated; the products that seem a tiny bit off, that don’t have the same quality control, perhaps owing to a worn factory part or an inexperienced technician; on and on and on and on.
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.
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.
These are small things. But some of them are not, and all of us experienced thousands of them amid an unprecedented crisis. And now, we’re still coming to realize that so many little innumerable things we used to do, places we used to go, routines we used to practice, people we used to see, simply weren’t there waiting for us on the other side.
So much of what we call “society” or “culture” is repetition, inertia, doing what we do, mentally narrowing down the world into navigable paths. One word for “breaking continuity with the past” is revolution. The irony is that some conservatives—the ones who shrugged at the death toll, who wanted to buy normalcy with blood—are the ones who are supposed to understand that the economy isn’t just a machine you can turn on and off. We got the blood, God knows. We did not even get the normalcy.
An economy is not a machine one can switch off and on again. And neither is a human society. This is the “vibes” that are off: all those little disruptions, all those little breaks. Each particular one is a mere grain of sand, but together, they constitute a new landscape. We live in a world now where almost everything is subtly not the same. We live, in a certain sense, in a subtly but entirely different society, where very few of the familiar routines, and very little of the embodied knowledge, we had in 2019 is still fully intact today.
How can a strong economy and moderate inflation produce such acute and widespread opinions to the contrary? They aren’t really; the problem isn’t that we’re seeing something that isn’t there, it’s that we’re reaching for the wrong word. And perhaps we reach for the word “inflation”—familiar, boring, comforting in the everyday frustration it entails—because the right words are too terrible to contemplate.
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Thank you for this. One of the things that the pandemic made clear to me is that a lot of people don't understand that sometimes things change and you never get your old life back again. You make a good argument that it's exactly that lack of understanding, combined with flailing around looking for an explanation, that explains a lot about where we find ourselves right now.
Great questions, great discussion. My background is in policy analysis and my partner kept bringing up how this policy or that policy wasn’t the right one. And my response was always
a) government has to act. That’s its function;
b) action under emergency conditions is never optimal; and
c) there needs to be discussion of what the government’s role should be and what the responsibilities of citizenship are.
I never thought that ever happened. There was instant politicization of issues, then a lot of rage, then some gradual fallout…but I’m still waiting on the comparative policy papers (I’ve read a few, they’re too limited) and the larger national discussion of the overarching social contract here. Because there’s no question that government has a role and that citizens have responsibilities.
There's also little doubt that acting like wearing a mask is the world's greatest hardship wasn't the right way to go. But I don't think government suppression of dissent (misinformation/disinformation) was necessarily the right way to go either – it stoked a lot of paranoia. In my opinion, there needed to be WAY more communication, way more coordination. And that discussion should be held at a national level and disseminated via the education system, which is where we cultivate civic values.
To me, that feels like what you’re taking up here.