The Vibe Seekers

Trendy words, ancient meanings

One word that has recently taken on a new prominence is the word “vibe.” I used to cringe (another word with a newfound popularity) when I used it because I felt lazy and imprecise, but I’ve grown to love it. It tells a beautiful story of a generation who, despite being bombarded with information, overloaded with news and media, and harassed with algorithmic content all day, have an unkillable ability to separate what’s real and wholesome from what’s fake and forgettable. Much more than a do what feels good attitude, describing something as a vibe (whether that be a person, a bedroom, a song, or a smile) means you’re accurately detecting that the vibe’s indescribable characteristics compliment your own indescribable characteristics.  

But really a vibe’s characteristics are not indescribable, they’re just touching, reverberating (vibing, if you will) with a part of the brain much more ancient than the rational, language-forming brain that’s able to do mathematics, construct an argument, or communicate thoughts and feelings. Vibes take the express train directly to the ancient brain, the same place where other illogical, ungraspable feelings of love, laughter, and longing are born.

Corporations are catching on to our infatuation with vibes, and are slyly trying to leverage it as a marketing tool to force feed us more of their product (E.G. curated streaming playlists, urging us to “catch their vibe”). But good vibes are organically grown, almost accidentally stumbled upon, fueled by a pent up internal momentum resulting from too much scrolling; they usually don’t involve paying for something, and they always generate a sense of belonging. Basically, the opposite of what any mega corporation stands for. Vibes have a shimmering aura (there’s another one) around them, and vibe seekers float towards them like moths to a flame, they’re not forced down your throat.

It’s possible to pull the wisdom of vibes into the modern part of the modern brain to describe and categorize vibes, but should we have to? It’s a ton of work to try and describe that which is indescribable. Plus, the modern logical brain just won’t get it. It will never feel that flame the way the ancient brain does, and at best will only feel a sense of smug fulfillment akin to completing a hard equation on the whiteboard in front of the class. Is it okay just to recognize things intuitively, without the need to explain it all? 

On the other hand, putting the harsh spotlight of the conscious mind directly on the vibe might formulate a deeper appreciation of the vibe itself, and perhaps even detangle the web of mystery that keeps us from understanding ourselves, why we’re attracted to that person’s smile, why we have that same song on repeat, and why we arrange our bedrooms just right. Conjuring a vibe into the conscious mind may even enhance our vibe receptors out in the real world, enabling us to navigate more easily back to that warm place when we stray too far. 

In an increasingly complex world, our modern, anxious, overanalyzing brains are working overtime trying to keep up, take sides, tally up, and join in, it’s no wonder that we are turning, silently but resolutely, into Vibe Seekers, letting our oldest internal wiring lead us by a cable tied to the pit of our stomach, reclaiming an ancient indescribable logic, an intuition that has been sidelined while our rational brain is overworked from digesting an onslaught of curated content.  Even if the word is faddish and overused, its prominence signals that we have a longing for an older form of connection, and a craving a fulfillment that can never be algorithmized.

I realize now that the word “vibe” is imprecise by organic design, because appreciating one is to cast that ungraspable, subconscious, “gut feeling” as your internal rudder, eschewing the rational, precise, detail oriented mind in place of a more spiritual leader. Those who are receptive to a vibe place a lot of faith in this inner, incommunicable world and recognize that, like those other poetic feelings of heartbreak and homesickness, the crucial part of a vibe is that it is something you feel in your body.