Vapid Vibes: What does our culture want us to want?
Vapid Vibes: What does our culture want us to want?
Growing up Eastern Orthodox, I often saw the icon of St. George on his horse, piercing a dragon with a lance.
In one version of the story, he slays the beast and then saves a princess, but in another legend he only wounds the dragon, then ties the princess’s belt around the dragon’s neck like a leash and its led back to town, now tamed.
Slaying the beast and taming the beast are two very different ways of dealing with the same problem: getting rid of it versus managing it. These are also two ways of dealing with technologies that are tyrannizing our lives. If we feel addicted to our smartphones, we can try to “slay” the habit by getting rid of the phone; or, we can keep the phone and try to control or “tame” our addiction.
But taming the dragon is much more difficult, not only because tech itself can be habit-forming, but because we exist in a wider culture that promotes a lifestyle of ease and entertainment—and something more insidious.
Writing in 2009, when our society was still transitioning from a TV culture to a more digital culture, William Deresiewicz observed that
The camera has created a culture of celebrity; the computer is creating a culture of connectivity. As the two technologies converge—broadband tipping the Web from text to image, social-networking sites spreading the mesh of interconnection ever wider—the two cultures betray a common impulse. Celebrity and connectivity are both ways of becoming known. This is what the contemporary self wants. It wants to be recognized, wants to be connected: It wants to be visible. If not to the millions, on Survivor or Oprah, then to the hundreds, on Twitter or Facebook. This is the quality that validates us, this is how we become real to ourselves—by being seen by others. The great contemporary terror is anonymity. If Lionel Trilling was right, if the property that grounded the self, in Romanticism, was sincerity, and in modernism it was authenticity, then in postmodernism it is visibility.
In 2009 and still today, this means, “I am online, therefore I exist”.
Our need to be visible to an audience, real or imagined, is one of the great vibes of modern life. Because this vibe is increasingly based on digital images and words, it’s a lot easier to manipulate, and to be manipulated by it. In the past, it was hard to make others pay attention when you said something, because you might not be anyone special. In the new vibe, you are already special just because you can say something.
But there’s a catch. If people hear what you say and like it, you’re enslaved to their adulation. If people don’t pay attention, you’re enslaved to the disappointment of not being heard. Either way you’re enslaved to a vibe which you’ve created or failed to create—and either way, all this happens within a larger cultural vibe that venerates validation.
When the prophets of old warned us to repent, they weren’t just engaging in moral finger-wagging, but telling us to turn away from worship of the self to the worship of the transcendent. The vibe of self-veneration has been around forever. What’s changed is that technology has given us the power to wildly amplify it.
And the vibe itself is subtly evolving. In 2009, when Deresiewicz was writing, the “property that grounded the self” was visibility, but in 2024, the self is increasingly grounded in narcissistic entitlement. The great contemporary terror is not simply that we might not be visible, but that we might not get what we deserve, or that we might not be as great as we imagine ourselves to be.
When the validation doesn’t come as expected, we can feel indignant or confused. Like customers who didn’t get the service they were promised. We might even hold others responsible for our insecurity, since according to the new vibe, we ourselves can’t be responsible—and any suggestion to the contrary can make us outraged, or else deepen our feelings of bafflement and hurt.
In 2009, our use of technology seemed “to involve a constant effort to stave off the possibility of solitude, a continuous attempt, as we sit alone at our computers, to maintain the imaginative presence of others.” 2009 is also the year that Facebook introduced the like button, and X (Twitter) and other platforms soon followed with similar functions.
Yet in 2024 we’re no longer just maintaining the imaginative presence of others, but trying to maintain their continual affirmation based on their likes, shares, comments, reposts—and if we’re lucky, a nod from some great digital celebrity, who floats in the cyberheavens like a god. No wonder 57% of young people want to be social influencers—and 41% of adults.
Sometimes, in life, affirmation is deserved. Some entitlements are legitimate. Encouragement is always good. But we have started to normalize narcissistic specialness. More than ever, we think we can function and succeed on ego fumes and the vapid vibes of hype and sentiment.
The result can be a corrupting optimism with little or no basis in reality. The Dodo in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland said, “Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.”
Or as Seinfeld puts it, “I am special. My mother was right.”
Seinfeld and the Dodo. Modern prophets.
In any other historical age, a person who thought of themselves this way—other than kings and lords—would have been considered deluded.
Yet this is the vibe of our age, and it’s so easy not to see it, precisely because it’s everywhere and all the time.
Mental health problems have dramatically increased in youth since 2009, likely in part due to smartphones and social media, which helped to usher in the new vibe. If you assume that you’re special or a great success, but it turns out nobody’s paying attention, you don’t just feel alone. You feel crushed.
The vibe has also infected our politics, encouraging leaders to focus relatively less on which policies are objectively good or bad, and relatively more on how to manage the self-esteem of the population.
At the personal level the vibe creates a feeling of ennui for anything outside of the vibe. It’s not just that we’re addicted to our devices; it’s not just a problem of dopamine. It’s a total change in where we locate a sense of worth. If something can’t be found on a screen, then it probably isn’t important.
Including ourselves.
We might know this feeling is false if we grew up in an earlier generation, when our sense of worth was anchored in family, work, religion, and other traditional sources. Even so, for many of us, and most of all for Gen Z’s—those who grew up with the Internet and screens—the sense of worth or lack of worth we get from our technologies may seem acutely real.
Which is why we live in a tragically strange era where it is possible for a 14-year-old to take his own life, allegedly because an AI chatbot suggested it; or where it is possible for AI to save someone from taking his life; or why a pair of grieving parents can use AI to resurrect their dead daughter in the “digital world”, complete with her actual voice.
We used to say the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, because our existence and worth was rooted in the transcendent, but now our sense of significance is entangled with the new digital vibe.
These are glaring examples, but the vibe often exerts its influence in more mundane ways.
In 2011, Jonathan Malesic taught a college class on the meaning and value of work. He would assign them nine books, and most of the students did “great”, acing their quizzes on classics like Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and Plato’s The Republic. But things have changed since 2011:
After 13 years that included a pandemic and the advent of generative A.I., that reading list seems not just ambitious but absurd. I haven’t assigned an entire book in four years.
Why is this happening? It might be tempting to think in the usual terms: young people are addicted to their devices, can’t concentrate, etc. And there might be some truth in that. Yet Malesic points out a deeper problem:
I’m beginning to think students who don’t read are responding rationally to the vision of professional life our society sells them. In that vision, productivity does not depend on labor, and a paycheck has little to do with talent or effort. For decades, students have been told that college is about career readiness and little else. And the task of puzzling out an author’s argument will not prepare students to thrive in an economy that seems to run on vibes.
Recent ads for Apple Intelligence, an A.I. feature, make the vision plain. In one, the actor Bella Ramsey uses artificial intelligence to cover for the fact they haven’t read the pitch their agent emailed. It works, and the project seems like a go. Is the project actually any good? It doesn’t matter. The vibes will provide.
Success isn’t a function of skill, effort and long struggles of sacrifice—of course not. Not when the right device or AI assistant can do the trick.
Yet the problem is not technology itself, but the cultural vibe in which it operates. This vibe can make it easy, in Malesic’s words, “to lose faith in humanistic learning”, which is why many young people find it hard to read. But it also makes it easy to lose faith in humanistic living. Why put in hard work, why take risk, why get your heart broken, why fight the good fight, when somebody else can fulfill our potential without any discomfort?
As long as we buy their product—or maybe give them our vote.
It’s hard to resist the vibe of our culture. It’s a pyramid whose foundation is an assurance that we each have great value and potential, and yet, paradoxically, that we’re helpless, unattractive and incapable; whose building blocks are a vast array of products, hype and fantasies that promise to validate our worth, or else numb us with entertainments; whose newest layers are technologies that amplify all this; and whose apex is an oversized feeling of specialness and self-stimulation, precariously balanced, at risk of tumbling down and shattering into a vast heap of insecurity.
And yet, our unique potential is real. Even the potential for greatness in some. It just won’t be found on that pyramid of illusions.
John Taylor Gatto spent decades teaching in some of the worst high schools in Manhattan, and he concluded that “genius is as common as dirt”, if only students are freed from rigid educational conformity and given a chance to develop their unique capacities. The new vibe imposes its own conformity on us, through a cloying influence that never leaves us alone long enough to discover who we are—and who we are not—and where our true worth is to be found.
Christians have a saying that we need to be in the world, but not of the world. Perhaps the same can be said of our culture and the vibe. Perhaps we need to be in our culture, but not of the cultural vibe.
How do we get there?
Deresiewicz’s answer to the problem, back in 2009, was solitude. It’s still a good place to begin in 2024. “Solitude,” he suggests, “enables us to secure the integrity of the self as well as to explore it”.
When we spend enough time alone, away from the vibe—without tech or TV, or whatever the source—we may start to shed some of its influence. We may start to recover a truer sense of our capabilities and potential, without relinquishing our aspirations—only adjusting the direction of our energies.
Then, we might even start to contemplate a vital question: Can I discover a counter-vibe, which resonates with the things that truly matter in life, and which buffers me from the influence of the vibe?
If we can answer this question, we can avoid being “of the vibe”, while still being a part of our culture and a contributor to its growth.
There are many dragons in our world, technological and otherwise, and the biggest danger isn’t that they breathe fire. It’s that they can charm us.
And if we’re not careful it will be we, not they, who end up leashed and tamed.
Links and Further Reading
Yesterday, just as I was finishing up today’s post,
published Is There a Crisis of Seriousness?, which is a good companion piece.Read the full text of William Deresiewicz’s excellent 2009 article, The End of Solitude.
If you’re looking for solitude while walking, join me, my wife
, and on a pilgrimage in Spain next year in June 2025. And if you want to find out how walking might be a good way to help free yourself from the current cultural vibe, check out The Walking Rebellion that Ruth and I are leading this month.If you enjoyed today’s post, you can support my writing with a purchase of my novel Exogenesis. Find it at the publisher, Ignatius Press, or at The Unconformed Bookshop and various other booksellers. Reviews here.