are we vibing too much?

Over the past year, I’ve been increasingly vexed by a sign outside my local gym telling me to “feel more vibes.”

At first glance, the advertisement doesn’t say anything at all. A vibe is a feeling, so I’m being encouraged to “feel more feelings,” but I’m always feeling feelings. The idea should be redundant, right?

Of course, more pragmatically, “vibe” is just a buzzword. The term has been showing up everywhere in recent years. Software engineers practice “vibe coding,” an expression coined in 2025. College students “vibe check” one another, an idea popularized in 2019. Google Trends shows the phrase “what a vibe” sharply increasing in usage since 2024, while the phrase “vibe shift” is from a 2021 Substack post.

The last time we were talking about “vibes” like this was the 1970s—the term for an “ambient sensation” was shortened from “vibration” in 1967, spawning the idea that you can have “good vibes” or “vibe with someone.” Then the vibes fell off in the 80s and now they’re back, like moustaches or bell-bottomed pants.

I’m sure part of the resurgence has to do with hip-hop culture, which continued using the word after it fell out of favor with the mainstream. Eventually, due to the sinusoidal nature of trends, the term started re-emerging: Kendrick Lamar came out with “Bitch Don’t Kill My Vibe” in 2013, while 2 Chainz released “It’s A Vibe” in 2017.

But I also think there’s something deeper going on. Vibes are, in the words of the UNC Professor Robin James, a form of “lay phenomenology” articulating something that philosophers have been trying to pin down for over a century. Heidegger called it stimmung. Walter Benjamin gestured at it through aura. To us, it’s a “vibe,” but all of these get at the same thing: we have vague, ineffable feelings about a situation.

And, if you think about it, the 70s were the last time ambient emotions were this culturally important. The hippie movement, turmoil around the newly televised Vietnam War, and the popularity of mind-altering drugs all contributed to a greater social emphasis on uncertainty and emotion. Then society became more precise, and we had less of a reason to discuss the imprecise. Computers introduced exact lines of code; the Reagan era established a sense of authority and hierarchy.

Now, in the 2020s, things once again feel uncertain and emotional. It makes sense that we would return to “vibes” at a time when we once again need to express vague feelings.

I can’t help but notice that our two most important technological developments—AI and social media algorithms—are both based on neural networks, which process information in a way that the human brain cannot understand. Our information is no longer neat and discrete, but represented in an ever-changing high-dimensional vector space. Our only option is to interact with these technologies through background intuition.

Consider “vibe coding,” the feelings-based approach to programming that depends on our aesthetic appraisals of how large language models (LLMs) will generate code. This term emerged because we can’t possibly articulate exactly what we want the AI to do, but we can “feel it out” through the “vibes”—our vernacularization of that ambient feeling.

As a social media influencer, I also have to “feel out” the direction of the algorithm to tap into social trends. This is not something that can be put into words; I instead rely on the general sense I get of how things are shifting between algorithmic weightings and the online zeitgeist. Once again, the best way to interface with the technology is an atmospheric, aesthetic appraisal.

Everyone on social media struggles with some version of this feeling. We are forced to “train” our algorithms into showing us the content we want to see, while remaining subjected to a fragmentary, transient kind of discourse. It’s impossible to get the full picture, so we may as well embrace our animal spirits.

And yet the sign outside my local gym shows how the vibes can be captured and commodified. As soon as something starts trending, like the word “vibe” itself, it’s immediately taken advantage of by people trying to make money off of you. Then the trend gets distorted into something unrecognizable.

In tracking how ideas spread, I constantly see how easily our cultural proclivities can be bent and redirected. I’m worried that our increased emotional resonance comes at the expense of logic and reason, which makes it easier to manipulate culture. If we’re not thoughtful about interacting with the world, our conversations and politics just start following the “pulse” of what’s happening, even when that’s a bad thing.

That’s not to say we should ignore our feelings entirely. The best of humanity is emotional and rational. In the words of Francisco de Goya, “imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her, she is the mother of the arts and source of their wonders.”

“The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters”

In other words, we should feel more vibes, but also remain vigilant. That means trying to learn what's happening inside our chatbots and algorithms. It means getting as full a picture of reality as possible, to see how we’re being affected, because whoever controls our feelings controls our culture.