What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: The 'Vibecession'

This week, the publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary named “rizz” as 2023’s word of the year partly for its “potential as a term of lasting cultural significance or providing a snapshot of social history.” But they got it wrong. The real word that provides a cultural picture of 2023 is “vibecession.”

Coined by Kyla Scanlon, vibecession has come to mean something like “widespread pessimism about the economy regardless of the economy itself.” We’re currently in the middle of a huge vibecession.

According to a recent poll from the Pew Research Center, 81% of Americans  think the gap between the rich and poor will grow between now and 2050, despite the fact that it’s (finally) shrinking. Total consumer confidence in the US is lower now than it was in the middle of the Covid lockdown, and 71% of Americans say economic conditions in the country are “poor” or “very poor” with 38% of respondents going with “very poor.” 

In the real world, unemployment is hovering around 3.5%, down from 14.7% during the lockdown. The median household income in the US has risen from a pandemic low of $65,100 a year to $74,600. That number doesn’t reflect the “rich getting richer” either. It’s driven from the bottom: In 2022, people in the lower half of income distribution in the U.S. saw their earnings increase by 4.5%, where the average rate for all Americans was 1.2%. The rate of inflation has been steadily falling too: It’s currently 3.24% compared to 3.70% last month and 7.75% last year. The GDP increased by 2% in 2022 and 5% the year before. Despite the constant drumbeat of doom from social media, all major economic indicators suggest things are going pretty well. 

America is longing for the good old days—of 1973

In researching the vibecession, one data point stuck out to me most: 58% of Americans say that life for “people like them” is worse today than it was 50 years ago—in 1973, a year that was way shittier for way more people than 2023 in just about any way that can be measured.

To further both realism and optimism, here are the hard numbers on the shittiness of 1973:

In 1973, more than half the population of the earth lived in autocracies, compared to about 13% today. Almost 60% of humans live in democracies today, compared to 25% in the early 1970s. About half of the world lived in extreme poverty in 1973, compared to about 8% in 2023. A total of 988,892 people died in war between 1970 and 1973, where 394,375 died between 2019 and 2022, the most recent years for which we have complete statistics.

In terms of domestic economics, unemployment was at 4.9% in 1973, compared to our current 3.5%. The economy grew at a rate of 5.6% in 1973 compared to 9.2% in 2022. Inflation was at 8.7% in 1973, compared to our current rate of 3.24%. The federal interest rate was 8.74% in 1973, compared to 5.25% today. Women earned about 56.6 cents per dollar of mens’ pay in 1973, compared to 83.7 today. 

In 1973, 55,984 Americans died in car accidents compared to 42,795 in 2022, and there are about three times as many cars on the roads. There was more crime of every type in 1973. People lived on average to 71 years in 1973, compared to 79 in 2023. A 20-inch television cost around $500 in 1973 and could probably pick up three blurry channels. Adjusted for inflation, that’s around $3,300. A Chrysler LeBaron cost $7541 in 1973 and could be expected to last around 100,000 miles. That’s $52,255.56 in today’s money, to purchase a vehicle you can expect to drive for twice as long.

Every year is a bad year

I could keep going, but you get the point. It’s not like 1973 was a particularly terrible year either—things really start really going south in 1974, and they kept going south until the early 80s, when the interest rate was nearly 20% and unemployment was near 10%. At the time, I’m sure people looked longingly back to the “good old days” of 1936.

This lack of historical context is at the heart of the vibecession and illustrates its danger. Tangible progress is made through trying to force the real world toward the perfect one we imagine could exist, but misremembering the past and convincing ourselves we let a utopia slip from our fingers does the opposite. It leads to pessimism, inaction, and defeat. People are feeding on that defeatism, too—politicians scaring people into voting for them, corporations profiting from selling comfort to an unsettled populace, social media companies monetizing angst, and more. But buying into to doomerism is not only depressing, it dishonors the people who devoted their lives to making 2023 marginally less shitty than 1973. I mean, who wants to pay $52,000 for a Chrysler LeBaron?

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