what the heck is a vibeshift?

and other ramblings

Hello!

Somehow, I seem to have acquired a number of new subscribers in the past few weeks, at the very moment when I’ve vowed to do my utmost to keep off the internet. I think I’ll make allowances for both writing and reading actual Substack posts, the sort that go directly to email, but I remain firmly committed to remaining as far away from the Notes App and the DMs, mentally and spiritually, as possible. (If I’m not answering you in either of those places, that’s why. Feel free to email me, and I might even respond.) The reason I’m trying to keep off social media in 2025, and then, hopefully, for the rest of my life, is banal and familiar. It’s just that I’m desperate to recover the sort of immersion I used to muster so effortlessly, before the internet sliced my mind up into small and inadequate scraps.

In the novel Mating, for which this Substack is named, one of the characters recalls ripping through a detective novel as a child. The narrator writes, “This was…an example of having a peak experience at the time you were having it and mistakenly assuming that it was the forerunner of many equal experiences waiting for you onward in life.” Of it wasn’t, and of course it couldn’t be, because nothing in the desiccation of adult life can rival the quiet and urgent quality of a child’s avid attention to a book. I did not have an especially happy childhood—I’ve written about my adolescent woes a bit here—but my ability to read myself onto another planet was precious, and I want to try to recover it as much as I am able to at this late date. There are people who profess to have a different relationship to social media and, while I can’t say I really believe them, I think it’s good form (respectful and so on) to act as if people were good judges of their best interests. So I wish them all the best while I protect my mind and soul by keeping the hell off anything that functions like Twitter did in 2021, when it fully broke my brain.

There are a few orders of business today.

First and most importantly, some recent writing:

(Several more pieces are coming soon, including one in the new issue of

The Point

that’s on the way, so gird your loins for a bit of a bombardment in the next few weeks.)

For the London Review of Books, I wrote about the Austrian novelist and playwright Elfriede Jelinek. Reading a lot of her work in one continuous stretch, as I did for months on end, was a little bit like vomiting over and over. I’m a reluctant admirer of her early books, but I think the late style that’s calcified in her work of the past decade is lazy. Even the early books are wretched and nauseating, by design. It’s a difficult business, distinguishing work that’s unbearably ugly in a good way (Women as Lovers, The Piano Teacher, and my favorite, Wonderful, Wonderful Times) from work that’s unbearably ugly in a bad way (Lust, Envy, Greed, etc). You can read the piece here: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n01/becca-rothfeld/signs-reduced-to-noise.

For the Washington Post, where I write nearly every week, I wrote about dogs, including my own perfect dog, Kafka, whom I am trying to elevate into a celebrity. A picture of him in all his glory is included in the piece, to my great satisfaction: https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/01/10/word-dog-good-life-mark-rowlands-review/.

Now for the good stuff—the things that have been annoying me lately

Everyone new here will find that I basically post two sorts of things, links to pieces I’ve written or edited, and rants. I do write other kinds of stuff—essays, criticism, maybe someday fiction (?????), even books—but I rarely if ever put it on Substack. This is my place for pettiness and petulance, two of my favorite virtues. Today I am annoyed by the “vibeshift” discourse, so that’s what I’ll rant about.

I’m generally a fan of Ezra Klein (I know, I know, I’m a normie winemom), and I think that he raises an interesting question in this piece about why it feels like Trump’s triumph signals a big cultural shift when in fact the margin of victory was small. It’s always fascinating when there is a gap between perception and reality (as in the case of the recent and much-lamented “vibecession”). But whenever someone writes a pair of sentence like “if you handed an alien these election results, they would not read like a tectonic shift. And yet they’ve felt like one,” I must ask, “felt like one” to whom? “The election was close, but the vibes have been a rout,” Klein continues. He is far from the only person to write about “the vibeshift” as if it’s a foregone conclusion, or as if it’s obvious what he even means.

Part of the problem I have with the vibeshift discourse is conceptual. What is a vibe shift? What, for that matter, is a vibe? Where is a vibe? Does a person have a vibe? Does an entire community have a vibe? Can one community have conflicting vibes? How are vibes delineated, anyway? How are they identified or detected? Is a vibeshift an epiphenomenon of an institutional change, or are vibes the drivers of concrete reforms? Which came first, the chicken or the vibe? Is a “vibeshift” the same as a shift in public opinion? If so, public opinion is not unified, so where has it shifted, and in what ways? If not, then how is a vibeshift different, and what the heck is it?

Maybe a “vibeshift” is occurring. Certainly some things *gestures wildly in the air* are changing. Maybe some of them are vibes? I ask because I genuinely don’t know what’s being said, so I don’t even know what could count as evidence in the thesis’s favor. It is definitely significant, in some way, that people like Zuckerberg are changing their tune about DEI initiatives and hate speech on the platforms they run, or that reactionary discourse seems to be thriving on social media and on podcasts. But significant in what way? What is the relationship between elites signaling a shift in allegiances—as Zuck et al. are doing, possibly for purely opportunistic reasons of wanting the incoming administration to cater to their financial interests, as Trump has basically been doing in a big way so far—and what, e.g., a dentist in Vermont thinks? Or an architect in Arizona? Or a public school teacher in Nebraska? Or…? It’s plausible to me that there is a relationship, some relationship, between Silicon Valley elites and the rest of us, but what is it? And what is its mechanism?

Part of the problem I have with the vibeshift discourse is empirical. If you’re going to heavily imply that the vibes are changing everywhere, or at least in a wider sphere than just your immediate milieu, you’re going to need to offer proof that isn’t a couple of Tweets or a personal anecdote. “This feels different to me” or “this feels different to my sister and she lives on the opposite side of the country” or “I saw this weird Tweet” is not a methodology. Of course, you’re probably qualified to discuss what “feels different” within your sphere. Feelings are real and probably vibes are too, at some level; personal experience is data, it just isn’t conclusive data when the claim it aims to substantiate is about not just you and people lke you but also about people who are radically unlike you. Because at the end of the day, how representative is your sphere? If you’re a writer or an intellectual, it’s probably not that representative. In 2021, roughly 80% of the country was not on Twitter, and that number has probably increased as X has hemorrhaged users; the number of total NYT subscribers is less than 1% of the country’s total population (granted, some of these subscribers are probably international, so the number may be even lower, but also the country’s total population includes children who would not read the NYT, so maybe the percentage of the reading public of appropriate age that subscries is a little higher. In either case, it’s low). As of 2022, less than half of Americans have college degrees—so like, think twice before you insist on regarding campus culture wars as a proxy for anything.

None of this means that “the vibes” in the univeristy or on Twitter don’t matter, or that we shouldn’t be chronicling shifts in academia or shifts in the arts. I’ve staked my career many times on the insistence that the arts and the life of the mind matter enormously. They matter because arts and ideas matter; they matter to me in particular because they are my world. But as much as it pains me to admit, they are not the the world. If I told even friends who are quite demographically close to me in some ways—alumni of the college I went to who now work as doctors or lawyers—that omg, Harper’s is doing an event with Red Scare, they would look at me blankly, uncomprehending. Intellectuals and writers and academics have some relationship with the rest of the world—or so we hope, and so we flatter ourselves by thinking—but what this relationship amounts to, in a given case, is a matter of contention.

It seems to me that writers and intellectuals and stalwarts of the commentariat like the idea of “a vibeshift” because it allows them to furrow their brows over a sexy grand narrative—certainly a narrative much grander and sexier and more fun to theorize about than, say, a narrative according to which people voted for Trump by not-that-big a margin because people always vote against incumbents during times of inflation. Now, it’s true that, regardless of why Trump won the whole thing, there might still be a vibe shift going on in some electorally irrelevant but culturally significant demographic. That’s worth discussing, if it’s true. But we have to do so while reminding ourselves and our readers that the vibe-shifters writers and thinkers are apt to encounter (unless we’re out doing reporting)—right-wing intellectuals, the editors of right-wing magazines, the occasional Straussian, Silicon Valley overlords, the alarmingly thin people converting to Catholicism in one micro-neighborhood in downtown New York that received disproportionate coverage despite the fact that church attendance is pretty much declining across the board in almost every religion in the country—are certainly not the norm. And it is the height of narcissism to presume that we can infer anything at all about the rest of the country and its supposed “vibes” from the behavior of the people across the aisle who are, after all, most like us. It actually makes me angry, lol. The solipsism, the fatal incuriosity, and the epistemic hubris implicit in a refusal to do any fieldwork before making a claim that big is infuriating to me.

To be clear, I’m not saying there isn’t a vibe shift, somewhere, for someone. I’m saying: for the love of God, tell me what a vibe shift even is so I know what that would even mean, and then go out and do the research to back up whatever you’re saying.