Future Forward: Understanding the Current 'Vibe Shift'

The Path to Purchase Institute’s Future Forward conference kicked off Tuesday in New Orleans with a morning keynote address that focused on trends — more specifically, the “vibe shift” the presenter says we’re currently going through.

Sean Monahan, founder of 8Ball, a culture/trends/technology newsletter, detailed how society is transitioning out of “normcore” with the current vibe shift.

“Early normcore was conspicuously blank clothing,” he said. “If everyone was hip, maybe being normal was cool. Normcore now lives on in culture as a renewed interest in minimalism and ironic nostalgia.”

Monahan is credited with coining the term “vibe shift” in a newsletter post that received attention in the media. The vibe shift can be described as the period in which one trend is declining and another is growing at the same time.

Changes in technology and society create problems and opportunities, Monahan said. “The collapsing of trust in mainstream media led to an explosion of indie media: podcasts, newsletters, zines and printed magazines. … The vibe shift identified the annoyed yet real revival of ‘hipsterdom’ — and the final death of the Millennial aesthetic.”

Monahan says that Gen Z has replaced Millennials as “arbiters of cool.”

Now, Monahan thinks about the future as “failure mode.” “We have this idea that the future is fiction. Our deep desire to either go back to an idealized past where everything stays the same, or that we're heading toward some utopian future where we reach some kind of high level of events development where, you know, things are kind of stable forever afterward.”

Furthermore, “I'm highly skeptical of anything that presumes that change will ever stop,” he said.

Monahan also discussed the rise of “pseudoreality.” “People don’t trust what they see,” he said. Social media, despite what many originally thought, is not a mirror on reality.

“This is going to really drive down the utility of social media,” Monahan said. “And it's going to create a much more privatized internet as people seek to ensure that when they're talking to someone, they're actually talking to that person, not a deep, fake version of their voice.”

“At the end of the day, what I find when I talk to young people is that while the internet may be a primary source of entertainment and communication, they also don't seem especially excited about it.”

Over time, “besides TikTok, there hasn't really been very much change [with the internet]. … It seems to me that the change is going to come, but maybe outside of the realm of software.”

He’s had “endless conversations with people who are frustrated with the fact that their phone is so distracting that they have trouble focusing on work, that they want to read a book.”

Monahan concluded: “The offline is like a new luxury space. The offline, where we create meaning, is going to be increasingly important over the next decade.”