Scott Alexander

Stocks are good.

Wages briefly shot up, then slowly declined and are now rising again.

Recent grad unemployment is rising.

Vibes are improving, but still bad in absolute sense.

Are we just conflating two different trends?

A mysterious meta-vibe session in the 2010s, and a real but explainable vibe session in the 2020s?

End quote.

Scott writes, In 2008, a lot of people thought the Great Recession heralded the end of capitalism, either to be replaced with something better, or at least to degenerate into some obviously futile dystopia that would end the charade and get everyone to finally agree that the system was rotten.

but actually capitalism shrugged off the Great Recession just fine and continued exactly as before.

That must have been a bitter pill to a lot of budding socialists.

I wonder if something about the situation broke people's brains.

Erica Rawle writes, My go-to illustration is the first verse of the theme song for Friends, which started airing in 1994.

So no one told you life was gonna be this way.

Your job's a joke, you're broke, your love life's DOA.

It's like you're always stuck in second gear when it hasn't been your day, your week, your month, or even your year.

End quote.

I'm younger than Erica and have less pop culture literacy.

Can someone tell me whether the Friends theme song was meant to express a zeitgeist that would be immediately recognizable by and sympathetic to most viewers, or whether we were supposed to interpret it as referring to a few especially unlucky people?

2.

Is the vibe session just sublimating cultural complaints?