Scott Alexander

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Thanks for listening, and I'll speak to you next time.

I've been studying this phenomenon for the past four years, so forgive the rather long comment.

A quick factual clarification, the Vibe session began in 2022 as the sentiment data divergence that opened up that summer is the real starting point.

The decade before didn't have the same shape of malaise, which you can see in the sentiment data you included.

The people who've also been working on the topic tend to focus on the same pressures you outlined, like housing, education, measurement problems, which are absolutely part of the story.

Maybe this is what you meant by smoking gun, but the vibe session has crossed into somewhat of a meaning-making crisis, which shows up in collapsing trust and inconsistent reactions to the data.

Every generation has one of these, but ours is flattened across all ages due to social media and those tighter economic constraints.

Expectations around future stability collapsed at the same time institutions lost credibility, and that combination changes how people interpret even good data.

Also, the post-2020 political environment runs on performance and constant identity signaling, and economic sentiment gets lost in those dynamics, which is why the usual models don't fully explain what's going on.

Finally, we really aren't in one right now, as the economic data has deteriorated meaningfully and the negative sentiment is warranted at this point.

Scott writes, I appreciate this guide to the original intent of the word, but I claim death of the author.

It seems to me this is more than just a two-year problem.

I remember people complaining about Hellworld, the broken social contract, the boomers tearing up the bridge behind them, vanishing opportunities for the young, the black pill of modern life, etc., well before 2022.

Memory can be faulty, but don't we need something like this to explain the Trump campaign, the Sanders campaign, Chapo Trap House, Red Scare, 4chan, and all the other mid-2010s politicians and media telling us that things were worse than they'd ever been, and outrage was the only acceptable response?

And I appreciate that the economic data have gotten worse, so that some level of worry is now justified.