Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to the Astral Codex X podcast for the 31st of December 2025. Title, Highlights from the Comments on Vibe Session. This is an audio version of Astral Codex X, Scott Alexander's Substack. If you like it, you can subscribe at astralcodex10.substack.com. 1. When was the Vibe Session? Kyla Scanlon writes, Hi, I'm the person who coined and first published this term.
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?
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Chapter 2: When did the vibecession begin?
And I appreciate that the economic data have gotten worse, so that some level of worry is now justified. But GDP growth last quarter was 4.3%. Without AI, it will have still been like 4%.
And I still hear people say they'll never be able to have a family, but it doesn't matter because it would be immoral to bring children into a world where they could never have any chance of getting ahead or living a normal life. Even if we're in a mild recession now, that doesn't sound like mild recession talk.
Still, Kyla has spiritual copyright on Vibe Session, so maybe we need another phrase to discuss the longer-term hypothesis. I propose, the Great Vibe-pression. TTR writes, quote, Then I got a job right out of college with a mediocre 3.6 GPA from a state school and went to work as an analyst for a mid-sized regional bank.
Got promoted internally a few times and lived very frugally with my wife, met at work. Now I'm able to be a stay-at-home dad with our kid while she works from home. We live in Oklahoma. We bought new construction last year for $200,000 with some spare cash I had lying around in a brokerage account. So I'm pretty fully cured of the doomerism. Success is trivial.
My bosses and co-workers constantly praise the fact that I approach my job with gratitude and focused on identifying the goals and achieving them efficiently and optimally from 9 to 5 every day. That's it. No late hours, no connections or networking or anything else fancy. End quote.
Good for TTAR, but I'm including this one here as confirmation that people graduating in 2014 felt like my parents and literally every single media outlet and professor were preaching doom at them.
Moose writes, quote, Every explanation for the vibe session that does not attempt to explain why there is a huge drop in 2021 specifically and persistently lower vibes for the following years should be disregarded. I think the best explanation is just inflation. This is what is most different from 2021 to 2024 compared to previous time periods.
But you can also blame the shift to remote work or higher housing prices. Examples of bad explanations would be phones bad, media bad, or inequality bad, without explaining why they became worse in 2021.
end quote scott writes i agree that if you follow the consumer confidence numbers and date it to 2021 to 2022 inflation is an easy culprit and we don't need to look for anything more my theory predicts that some sort of vibe session will continue even when inflation is far in the past
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Chapter 3: Is the vibecession a reflection of cultural complaints?
Should we subsidise journalists on the theory that if they're in a good mood, everyone else will be in a good mood too? Is this Chris Best's secret plan for Substack? Subscribe. Golden Feather writes, quote, See for example one on Axios.com linked here. No. end quote. Scott writes, Cremier, on X, objects to the chart showing each generation doing better than the last.
He writes that they, quote, divided by the square root of household size, end quote, but that this is, quote, problematic because it means Gen Z incomes are being inflated to the extent that they live with their parents, end quote. I'm not entirely sure what he means by this.
If Zoomers were being counted as living in a large household, wouldn't that deflate their income by dividing by an artificially high denominator? Maybe he means boomers are getting deflated because their adult kids are counted as part of their household. But this wouldn't affect the 20-year-old band where he's doing most of the comparison.
In any case, he includes a couple sharing unit graph that avoids this problem. Here's another graph. Median market income by age and generation by sharing unit. Scott writes, And it still shows every generation doing better than the last, albeit by a smaller amount. Joel Long writes, quote,
I've not been able to find data to assess this, but my pet theory is that the basket of consumption middle-class people are chasing as normal has changed. Anecdotally, I see this on 1. Expected square footage per person in housing. For example, kids sharing bedrooms seems much less universal than it used to be. 2. Vehicle space per household member, meaning both size and number of vehicles.
My perception is also that cars as status goods has made its way further down the socioeconomic ladder than it used to be, but that's wild speculation. 3. Frequency, duration and distance of vacations. I blame this one, perhaps unfairly, on the prevalence of travel vloggers, but there is some data. Here's a link to some tourism data on ourworldindata.org.
Basically, while people have gotten wealthier over time, the standard of living they're pursuing has increased even more, which can come out as feeling poorer on net. End quote. Mika writes, I think the low friction of applications is a big driver of this, both in jobs, college, dating, etc.,
I am in my final year of an electrical engineering degree and applied to around 500 full-time jobs this fall. I'm a reasonably economically minded person. I try to avoid pessimism, know the stats on how everything has gotten better over time, pro-capitalism, etc.
But even I was having trouble mentally reconciling what I knew about the numbers with my feeling from the inside of like being rejected over and over again while being in a pretty in-demand field. Additionally, my algorithm started to pick up on this and fed me content about how the sky was falling, no one was getting hired, etc. Things got pretty dark for me mentally for about a month.
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