Can the Vibes Be Saved?
I'll try turning the zeitgeist off and back on again.
Hi friends!
Did you hear the delectably despicable news that Al Pacino, 83, is expecting a baby with his 29-year-old girlfriend? The votes are in (7-6), and the board has officially named him American CEO of Old Man Summer — successor to Robert De Niro, who welcomed a baby girl just a few weeks ago at age 79, his seventh child with four different women.
With only a few weeks to go until the official start of our best and shvitziest season, we have really found ourselves in a situation. The vibes, while on the fritz for many years now, have reached a historic level of weirdness. We all know at least one person who has completely lost the plot and, honey, who can blame them? Up is down, down is up, and the news cycle is just a ticker tape parade of existential threats with a few celebrity babies thrown in. The world is teetering on the brink and crazy is thriving. These vibes are why the ice bath trend continues to grow — a great example of what we’re dealing with since torturing yourself in a freezing vat of water is both a treatment for and symptom of the condition.
By all means please do whatever you need to do to get off the twisted path — I have recently taken up “resting” as a hobby with excellent results. Walking aimlessly for miles is also a favorite of mine, as is finding pure joy in a well-constructed sandwich. This is a key moment for us to get our shit together and turn this around, energetically speaking, because I want to have a nice summer and I can’t do it alone.
Humanity has danced with demise since the dawn of time. And here we are because no famine, asteroid, plague, quick-footed carnivore, volcano, earthquake, or power hungry warlord has taken us all out just yet. Many moons ago I visited an ancient city in Turkey where 20,000 people and their livestock literally moved underground for generations to avoid being killed in the Arab-Byzantine war. If there’s one thing we know for sure, it’s that people will always be misbehaving, politically.
I’ll never forget the claustrophobia I had descending the tunnels into that city and I’ll never forget the magnitude of what was built beneath the surface, an entire world carved out of stone that was both elaborate and secure enough to ensure survival. They had homes, chapels, schools, they dug air shafts, had wells for water, and constructed communal kitchens and dining halls. They were the original preppers with a much better bunker aesthetic.
Everyone alive today is a descendent of someone who survived more physically perilous times. Us resilient humans have somehow made it this far without succumbing to the earlier apocalypses which leads me to believe we might just get through this one, too. Technology is our outlier, but I don’t think AI will take us out. Just like we haven’t all been nuked to smithereens yet, the powers that be will figure out a way to control it, hopefully after it takes all of our jobs and we get to rebuild a utopian society with way more chill.
What may take us out is watching everything unfold on our little phone screens one vertical video at a time. There’s a lot to be concerned about, sure, but marinating in internet misery does nothing but create a feedback loop of fear and inaction. I’m going to have to ask everyone to try and find a little hope in the horror. Think of the children that so many of you have brought into our melting world!
This is a liminal era and uncertainty is our reality, but there’s also excitement in imagining what’s to come, the change that needs to happen, the progress we want to see for ourselves, for our world. The collective hope for things to go back to normal faded long ago even as business went back to usual — now all we have is how we choose to move forward together so we don’t end up making everything worse and have a fighting chance of making it better.
Having hope through the unknown takes courage, curiosity, and the strength to let go of what we think things should look like — we’re flooded with images of other people’s lives these days and it makes it hard not to weigh what you have against some imaginary standard, but I promise you there is no alternate path, no hologram version of your life where everything was left unmarred. Until we can send the holograms out in our likeness while we stay home with our feet up, they’re not relevant to our daily lives. The holograms are reserved for the ABBA show in London which a very reliable source has just told me is one for the annals of the Age of Unhingement™ and now I can’t wait to visit and tell you all about it.
It’s going to take all of us to save these janky vibes. So, in conclusion, you better behave, and if not for yourself, then do it for me. I only have a few dozen good summers left and this needs to be one of them.
Less Lessons More Blessin’s™️
Liz