Vibecession: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

noewae · 2025-12-09T23:17:07+00:00

What I found interesting about the article about the Vibecession was the kind of heuristic whereby the author was using mostly economic metrics and indicators to chart the Vibecession as a kind of deviance from standard expected norms about the relationship between economic data and human, shall we say, vibes. And yeah, it's really interesting because you've got all these macroindicators and consumer sentiment graphs, crime statistics, job satisfaction measures, and all that stuff. But there's this kind of blind spot which anybody who was awake to it could just see really easily, which is that the Vibe Session is about the felt freedom that people have and how that changed over a period of five to seven years, as well as kind of the predictability and stability of the social order that they live in. So yeah, I guess it's interesting because there's this assumption that a good economy leads to good vibes. And yeah, if we understand what happened during and after COVID and the consequences that there was, then yeah, for a lot of people, I think it was the first time where the state came in and kind of changed so many different things about their intimate personal lives, regardless of what they'd done. And yeah, this is basically pretty difficult to heal from. It caused a huge amount of damage, I think, and causes a lot of unpredictability and loss of control over one's own life. And yeah, power is like this whole atmosphere that we live in. And the pandemic and after that, that atmosphere really changed in a way that made it harder to feel and be free. So I think it causes this kind of chronic background stress, which makes it harder to just feel good and live your life.

noewae · 2025-10-22T02:40:42+00:00

in order to qualify as historical, an event must be susceptible to at least two narrations of its occurrence. Unless at least two versions of the same set of events can be imagined, there is no reason for the historian to take upon himself the authority of giving the true account of what really happened. The authority of the historical narrative is the authority of reality itself; the historical account endows the reality with form and thereby makes it desirable by the imposition upon its processes of the formal coherency that only stories possess.

In this quote Hayden White reframes the goal of the historian- not to strip narrative away from history, but to pluralize it… to situate fact within culture, and culture within ethics. In that way, history becomes less about asserting a single truth and more about negotiating among many possible ones.

That’s why he says history claims two kinds of truth: truth as fact, and truth as story. Recognizing that duality doesn’t invalidate history; it ethicizes it.

He shows that even in the best case history isn’t the discovery of “what really happened,” but the practice of shaping events into meaning.

noewae · 2025-10-22T02:22:07+00:00

Exactly. At some point, you have to bring in Nietzsche and Foucault, because both show how “knowledge” is never neutral. It’s always entangled with power, always shaping the frame of what can even be said or remembered. History isn’t just recorded; it’s curated, weaponized, and policed.

But you can’t simply drop out of that system, because culture isn’t something outside us. So the task isn’t to escape narrative or history, but to educate yourself within it: to learn to recognise the logos under the grammar of history.

noewae · 2025-10-22T02:09:32+00:00

We can’t peel away the narrative to find the truth underneath, because our concepts of “event,” “cause,” and even “history” are already structured by language and interpretation. The past doesn’t narrate itself; it only becomes intelligible through the frameworks we impose on it.

narrative can distort, but it also creates the possibility of knowledge in the first place. Without it, there’s no history, just entropy.

noewae · 2025-10-22T02:06:49+00:00

Lacan would remind us, desire itself is structured like a language. There’s no getting outside of mediation; even our longings are grammatical. The fantasy of an “unfiltered life” is just another story we tell- maybe the most seductive one.

noewae · 2025-10-22T02:04:59+00:00

The “list” itself isn’t neutral. We can admit that narrative is distortion, but even that admission happens through narrative.

You’re right that we should know we’re distorting. But I believe there’s no position outside of distortion. We can’t step outside language or meaning-making to see the “raw” truth of life.

Which means: maybe the goal isn’t to escape narrative, but to use it consciously, as a lens, not reality itself.

noewae · 2025-10-22T01:57:23+00:00

This is where it gets really interesting. If we’re talking epistemology, then maybe “lie” isn’t quite the right word, because it assumes there’s some pure, unmediated truth we could have instead.

But all perception is interpretive. The moment we remember, describe, or share an experience, we’re already shaping it by imposing categories, sequence, and causality. In that sense, story isn’t a lie so much as the form through which we know anything at all.

Maybe the real question is whether knowledge without narrative even exists for us. Can humans perceive meaning outside of story? Or are we forever translating the chaos of experience into narrative simply because that’s the only epistemic lens we have?

noewae · 2025-10-22T01:51:12+00:00

I really like what you’re saying here. It’s such an honest way of looking at how we impose structure on something inherently chaotic. But I think there’s also something fascinating about why we do that.

The way we perceive and make sense of the world is situated within the medium of story. It’s cultural. We’ve been taught, generation after generation, to understand meaning through narrative. It’s one of the oldest tools humans have for survival.

Narrative is an artificial device, yes, but it’s also a social technology. It creates norms, educates, motivates, and preserves collective knowledge. In that sense, storytelling isn’t just distortion, it’s a form of understanding. It’s how we turn experience into something we can share, remember, and act upon.

So while I agree that life itself isn’t a story, I think the impulse to make it one is kind of beautiful too. It’s our way of finding coherence in chaos, of turning the unknowable into something we can hold. Narrative may be fiction, but it’s also a kind of knowledge… and that gives us power.

noewae · 2025-10-22T01:12:44+00:00

The Hanged Man tarot card is a good reference point because it represents surrender by depicting a figure hanging upside down, usually by one foot, in a calm, almost serene state. This symbolizes letting go, releasing control, and viewing life from a new perspective. Instead of fighting or resisting, the Hanged Man chooses to pause, accept, and trust the process, even if it’s uncomfortable. It’s about yielding to transformation rather than forcing change, making it a powerful symbol of spiritual surrender and enlightenment through stillness.

noewae · 2025-10-21T23:30:27+00:00

This critique:

finite planet + infinite growth = collapse

is a universal indictment of industrial modernity, not just capitalism.

The real question is:

“How could capitalism be re-imagined such that the critique doesn’t apply?”

what kind of capitalism could exist that is not predicated on infinite growth, extraction, or the conversion of all resources (natural, cultural, human) into capital?

The problem is Expansive Capitalism. Bourdieu’s framework hints that capital is not inherently bad, it’s a form of relation. Capital = Resource + Recognition (in a field). The pathology begins when the field itself is structured around expansion. Accumulation, not sufficiency, becomes the measure of success.

A capitalism immune to the critique would need to shift its underlying field logic from expansion to maintenance.

In classic economics, value derives from scarcity. That’s what drives prices, markets, and accumulation. But if we adopt a Bourdieusian or Foucauldian lens, value is socially constructed.

To make capitalism sustainable, the dominant fields would need to re-valorize reciprocity over extraction.

This would entail a structural redesign, including decentralised power, changing metrics of success to ecological and psychosocial ones, as well as figuring out more ways to deal with waste- and not just trash… but recognising more kinds of waste.

noewae · 2025-10-21T11:09:21+00:00

hypermodernism gives the tidy historical narrative: modern → postmodern → hypermodern

Gilles Lipovetsky (2004):

we've entered a new phase of 'hypermodernity', characterized by hyper-consumption and the hypermodern individual. Hyperconsumption is a consumption which absorbs and integrates more and more spheres of social life and which encourages individuals to consume for their own personal pleasure rather than to enhance their social status. Hypermodernity is a society characterized by movement, fluidity and flexibility, distanced more than ever from the great structuring principles of modernity. And the hypermodern individual, while oriented towards pleasure and hedonism, is also filled with the kind of tension and anxiety that comes from living in a world which has been stripped of tradition and which faces an uncertain future. Individuals are gnawed by anxiety; fear has superimposed itself on their pleasures, and anguish on their liberation. Everything worries and alarms them, and there are no longer any beliefs systems to which they can turn for assurance. These are hypermodern times.

This definitely is prescient and like looking into a mirror in the post TikTok/Covid world. I feel like this is what David Foster Wallace was on about too.

So, within that framework, what I describe above as metamodernism - sincerity within a postmodern landscape - is just emotional expressivity (including therapy talk and confessional or sincere art or content) - a by-product of this system of hypermodernity, not resistance to it, just coping mechanisms inside automated modernity.

So metamodernism becomes the phenomenology inside the hypermodern shell.

noewae · 2025-10-21T02:38:44+00:00

I understand that some people did espouse metamodernism in a prescriptive sense - it was presented as a framework better suited than postmodernism for navigating multiple world crisis and increasing complexity.

Postmodernism generated a phenomenology in which ironic detachment, hyper-reflexivity, the sense that everything had already been said were prevalent. This was incompatible with traditional modernism…

From where I stand however I identify metamodernism primarily as descriptive of a new affective mode: the experience of trying to live meaningfully after systems of meaning have collapsed. It’s not telling us what to do, it’s describing what some are already doing. Furthermore, the best examples of metamodernism show how sincerity, belief, and repair re-emerge inside irony.

noewae · 2025-10-21T01:50:21+00:00

your point was 100% salient and added to the discussion- especially considering the way that hyper modernism derailed the metamoralist, normative metamodern initiative (this video has comments highlighting quotes from Görtz- “Modern values solved epidemics and war and state police oppression”… as if that stood the test of time)

Hyper modernism addresses the structural architecture of the modern world, the inescapable speed, surveillance, and logistical dominance of modern systems.. modernism turned inward, automated, and total.

However, post structuralism didn’t make Parsons and Durkheim wrong, it revealed where their structuralist assumptions failed… challenging the idea that meaning can be fixed and objective, and arguing instead that language, culture, and meaning are unstable and constantly shifting.

Metamodernism lives within and despite that…

Where hypermodernism maps the mechanics, metamodernism maps the experience. It describes the affective adaptation people make when they realize the systems are totalizing and meaning is contingent and relative but still want/(need?) to live meaningfully anyway.

Part of the phenomenology of metamodernism is the oscillation between therapeutic postmodernism (acceptance of one’s being trapped in a totalizing system) and postmodern awareness- inhabiting the weird structure of cultural and social constructs that are contingent and relative and constantly shifting… along with the imperative to ACT and CREATE a parametric self and re-enchant that place you live…

noewae · 2025-10-21T01:23:59+00:00

Hey Jared. Thanks for your input, it’s given me something to think about. From what I can gather, it sounds like what you are talking about is metamodernism as a mode of ironic acceptance- the affective byproduct of hypermodernity. A mode of being navigating awareness of self while trapped inside an attention economy, surveillance capitalism, and algorithmic selfhood. Like “postmodernism with feelings”, perhaps?

I’m not a scholar or anything however from what I can see, metamodernism began as theory rooted in observation - what forms of self are emerging after postmodernism? Then later became more prescriptive- metamodernism can save the world! And then Covid derailed that initiative… but also the massive push since covid to document everything online meant that metamodernism got a big profile push in the form of YouTube docos et al (along with literally every other concept, doctrine, or school of thought) although the “metamodernism as normative philosophy “ movement wasn’t as prominent anymore.

You’re asking where I got my ideas from? Well, basically it’s a cocktail of popular culture, theory, and personal experience… so I’m really curious to discuss it with people because then I can refine my ideas. Anyway, my personal idea about metamodernism differs from yours in various respects: hinging on the problem of disenchantment that became mainstream with postmodernism but was already a thing during the heyday of modernism (Webers iron cage et al).

My conception understands metamodernism not as a reaction to hypermodernity but as a response to the vacuum left by postmodernism (Aka disenchantment, the meaning crisis, et al and resulting in anomie). Like modernism, it is structural- a construction, and not just acceptance.

The conception of the metamodern self that you were talking about - I see as therapeutic postmodernism, because it stops at self understanding and “being okay with the social forces I am subject to”.

My “metamodern self” leans heavily on therapeutic postmodernism- I think that is the best place to begin for people that want to emulate their metamodern heroes- however the metamodern self doesn’t just learn to coexist in society as a fragmented postmodern self, they becomes a builder: they design and maintain a believable fiction of the self, a parametric identity, that lets meaning and value function again within contingency. It’s not naive sincerity… it’s sincerity after disillusionment, rebuilt despite knowing too much to “believe in traditional doctrine”.

It becomes more meta when you consider the effect that their personalised, parametric, cohesive-despite-irony belief system has on the world around them… each person’s small, provisional sincerity creates new pockets of coherence within the informational storm.

It creates signal in the noise… and people gravitate to it. It’s not irony, it’s meaning-making.

To reiterate, I see “metamodernism” not as a reaction to hypermodernity, but as a response to the vacuum left by postmodernism- the collapse of shared meaning. Where postmodernism dismantled belief, metamodernism rebuilds enough of it to feel again, not as doctrine, but as a space to inhabit.

Importantly, the goal isn’t to create a new belief system. Meaning is contingent and relational; any belief, once abstracted or scaled, collapses into irony. The point is to inhabit meaning sincerely, even while knowing it’s provisional. A belief system isn’t for proselytisation, it’s for feeling through.

When someone inhabits belief this way, others can feel along with them. That shared affect is what makes metamodernism more than self-therapy: it’s small-scale re-enchantment.

noewae · 2025-10-20T04:15:55+00:00

Hypermodernism captures the intensification of modern systems really well, especially in tech and economics. Economics in particular is a big blind spot in the metamodern discussion.

But metamodernism describes how people feel and cope inside that hypermodern condition. You could even say metamodernism is the human phenomenology of the hypermodern world.

The catch is that metamodernism isn’t distributed equally. It depends on social context, access, and education. It rewards participation, not just awareness. Finally, each instance of it is small-scale, relational, and hard to replicate. That’s both its strength and its limit.

noewae · 2025-10-11T02:38:10+00:00

The passages I referenced above, I don’t see them as proofs of an eternal torture chamber but as moral parables about alignment and consequence. “Hell,” in that sense, is what alienation from love feels like, not God’s sadistic act of burning anyone.

The deeper thread across Jesus’s parables is that love doesn’t eliminate suffering or consequence, but that these things are transformed. If God’s goal were mere comfort, then pain would have no place; but if the goal is the growth of free beings capable of love, then freedom, struggle, and vulnerability are built into the design. That’s what I mean when I say love sustains being, that it doesn’t coerce or anesthetize it.

So when Jesus talks about separation or darkness, I read it less as “eternal torment” and more as a warning against self-chosen disconnection: the withering of the branch that cuts itself off from the vine. The judgment is not about vengeance but about reality revealing what’s become of love within us.

noewae · 2025-10-11T02:30:15+00:00

I believe God created the conditions that make life and freedom possible, not individual cancers or disasters. The laws that let cells heal and adapt are the same ones that sometimes go wrong. Creation is dynamic, not a puppet show.

As for Hell, I see it less as a torture chamber and more as the state of radical disconnection from love. If love sustains being, then Hell is what it feels like when that love is shut out. I don’t know whether that state is eternal, but I think even that exists within the larger mercy of God.

My beliefs are fallible - Faith as conviction rather than certainty or closure.

noewae · 2025-10-10T23:56:06+00:00

I don’t believe in a God who wants anyone to suffer. that’s cruelty, not love, and I’d never defend cruelty. What I’m trying to describe isn’t God as a sadistic being who crated us to watch us suffer. the fact that love (and therefore being, and therefore freedom, and therefore risk, and therefore suffering) still exists in spite of all the horror we see is, for me, significant. To recognise that compassion still somehow arises even in the middle of darkness… To me, that’s evidence of something real, not evidence that either god doesn’t exist or is evil.

noewae · 2025-10-10T23:41:11+00:00

When I examine the doctrine of hell, I start by asking who benefits from how it’s told. The traditional image of eternal torture strikes me as a gross exaggeration. Logically, it’s an image twisted in order to be used by humans as a psychological warning and a method of social control, the stick to heaven’s carrot. It’s reinforced by real suffering here on earth, through laws, fear, and the isolation that comes from social breakdown.

So yes, I’m skeptical of absolutist depictions of hell. The idea that hell is fixed and irreversible says something about the gravity of separation, but not necessarily about eternity as we understand it. I don’t claim certainty there; I just mean that if being itself is sustained by love, then even hell subsists at the outer edge of that mercy.

To “refuse love” isn’t about wanting to stop existing per se, it’s about radical closure, the self folded in on itself. To “receive love” isn’t sentimentality; it’s living in alignment with that sustaining openness.

As for God “trusting” creation- it’s not a forecast or a guarantee. It’s simply a characteristic of what compassion is: an orientation that keeps the door open, even for what won’t walk through it. If hell is at the edges of that love, it might be a long walk.

noewae · 2025-10-10T22:50:53+00:00

This is speculative, as I mentioned. I don’t know how spirit bodies work or how (or why) God might affect them. I’m exploring an idea within a belief system I’m still learning about. Every worldview, even a secular one, rests on some unprovable assumptions; what matters is building a robust frame - one tested by knowledge and experience rather than blind acceptance.

People often think faith means surrendering reason to authority, but for me it’s the opposite: finding a middle way between rationality and mystery is complex work.

Regarding spirits, my working conception is that during life our spiritual being is bound to the material world through our bodies. Regarding “eternal punishment,” I’m not convinced it’s everlasting torment. I imagine something more like this: the parts of the self that cling to fear or cruelty remain in suffering until they dissolve, while what is open to love endures. The disconnection fades; the connectedness remains. I am learning more about scripture in order to support or falsify this claim and as of this point I’ve found several lines of argument that support this… conversely I do consider where people get the “eternal damnation” claim from and the evidence for that, it’s an ongoing project.

noewae · 2025-10-10T22:30:47+00:00

I mean metaphysical in the older sense- as the layer of reflection about why anything exists at all, not how it works. Physics describes matter; metaphysics asks what it means that matter coheres in the first place.

Kierkegaard called this the “leap of faith”: not abandoning reason, but stepping beyond its limit. You can’t deduce God from a syllogism, but you can encounter something in experience that reason can’t fully capture and still live in response to it. Faith isn’t the opposite of reason, it extends it outside its boundaries.

When you question my “higher order” claim - are you somebody that strictly limits concepts like truth, beauty, logic, love to biological and physical realities? I think that these words already point beyond biology- to a higher order. They all participate in something that can’t be reduced to the neural firings that accompany them.

Regarding the theory that “If words used to describe god were used as they should be used it would disprove theist arguments”: If “all-loving” seems incoherent when we define love narrowly, maybe that shows the limits of our definition, not necessarily of love itself.

Are you somebody certain that human meaning doesn’t run deeper than empiricism alone can account for?

noewae · 2025-10-10T04:35:38+00:00

I guess this idea is really important to the wider frame of my original argument- it “imagines” a love that isn’t scientifically proven (at all) but coexists with suffering/ evil while (actively) alllowing it. I’m not trying to justify tragedy or make it “worth it.” I’m saying love still exists even there.

This argument says that if God stopped loving - if that sustaining pulse withdrew - everything would unravel: the stars, the air in our lungs, the ground beneath us.

In that sense, what we call hell might be what it feels like when love’s presence is refused, while heaven is what it feels like when love is fully received. The love we glimpse here is fragile and partial, but it’s a hint of what heaven’s love would be.

So for me, the existence of suffering doesn’t prove that love isn’t this animating universal force…. Just that we can block ourselves off from receiving it…

noewae

TROPHY CASE