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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   15149 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 1, 2025

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Scott Alexander just released another "Much More than You Wanted to Know" article, this time on the Vibecession.

He goes through all of the traditional arguments in his standard exhaustive way: is it housing? no. is it wealth inequality? no. is it wages down? no. is it overall GDP down? maybe, but no.

Ultimately he makes the case that the economy is doing well, and the younger cohort is doing great. Many economic indicators do seem to show that in real terms, they are doing better than ever! Reading this article I was excited to see that he might get to what I consider the real problem, but alas, he concludes in a very lukewarm way with:

Because of decreasing application friction, any given opportunity requires more effort to achieve than in earlier generations. Although this can’t lower the average society-wide success level (because there are still the same set of people competing for the same opportunities, so by definition average success will be the same), it can inflict deadweight loss on contenders and a subjective sense of underachievement.

Because of concentration of jobs in high-priced metro areas, effective cost-of-living for people pursuing these jobs has increased even though real cost-of-living (ie for a given good in a given location) hasn’t. This effect is multiplied since it’s concentrated among exactly the sorts of elites most likely to set the tone of the national conversation (eg journalists).

Homeownership has become substantially more expensive since the pandemic (although the increase in rents is much less). This on its own can’t justify the entire vibecession, because most vibecessioneers are renters, and the house price change is relatively recent. But it may discourage people for whom homeownership was a big part of the American dream.

But even if these three factors are really making things worse, so what? Have previous generations never had three factors making things worse? Is our focus on the few things getting worse, instead of all the other things getting better or staying the same, itself downstream of negative media vibes?

I find this hard to believe, but am unable to find the smoking gun that definitively rules it out. I hope this post will serve as a starting point for further investigation: now that we’re all on the same page about which purported explanations don’t work, we can more fruitfully investigate alternatives.

I hope that eventually Scott comes around to the idea that economic indicators are a proxy for community, emotional and spiritual health! Ultimately the average person doesn't really care much about the economy or their wealth, instead they care about how easy their life is. How pleasant their interactions are. What the emotional tone is of the people they interact with the most.

Scott does briefly get into this talking about the 'negative media vibes,' but for some reason he doesn't dig in there more?

My take is that our culture and religious framework have been breaking down at an increasing speed for the last couple centuries, and the last few decades we have accelerated into freefall. It's complete chaos out there, the Meaning Crisis meaning that young people have zero clue what to do with their lives, no consistent role models to follow, and as we discussed in a post below, they basically are told that they're doing great even if by objective standards they are fucking things up terribly.

The younger cohort has lost connection to any greater framework of values that teaches them how to actually live in a positive and healthy way. Instead, they are awash in technological substitutes for intimacy, cheap hedonistic advertising, and an increasing propensity to fall back to vicious, tribal infighting based on characteristics like race, gender (or lack thereof), or economic status.

Overall the vibes are bleak not because of any material wealth issues, but because the spirit of the West is deeply, deeply sick.

Although this can’t lower the average society-wide success level (because there are still the same set of people competing for the same opportunities, so by definition average success will be the same),

So he isn't taking into account the Indians (here, but more obviously in Call Centers overseas), the Latin Americans (and their growing remitance money to their countries of origin) and the Chinese (trained in american schools and and employed in chinese companies).

Your grandfather had to be the best of his city, your father the best of the state and you, you have to be the best in the world.

you, you have to be the best in the world.

Not actually as hard as it sounds, given patio11's "narrowing your professional Venn-diagram" thing -- it's hard to be the best software dev in the world, but "best available English speaking dev with deep domain expertise in X and track record of Y" is eminently acheivable.

what is the niche in which you are the best in the world?

That would be pretty obvious doxxing, now wouldn't it?

I would say that there's actually multiple in which I could be plausibly the best available person in the world, if I were available.

The Venn diagram starts with things like "located in North America", "speaks and writes excellent native English", "formal degree", "competent but not great programmer in languages X,Y,Z" -- this is still a pretty big set, but much smaller than "literally everyone in the world".

Now add "deep knowledge of areas X,Y,Z that are not typically things that programmers are into" plus maybe "experience solving problems in these domains with code" and the set shrinks dramatically -- for patio11 as I recall X,Y,Z were "finance blogging", "corporate Japan" and "bingo card generators"; last I looked he's some kind of emeritus with Stripe, so it seemed to work with him.

Niche areas are niche, of course -- so the intersection of "people who want to hire somebody with these skills" and "people who don't already have such a person on payroll" may be unhelpfully small -- that's where the networking comes in I guess.

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