Why are the vibes so off?

A reflection for supporting readers

Photo by Dan Meyers on Unsplash

If there’s one thing that most people seem to agree on, it’s that something is off. Something doesn’t feel right around here. At the end of 2023, only 23% of Americans polled thought the country was headed in the right direction. But I would argue it’s bigger than that. Countless people are fed up with both parties, fed up with inflation, fed up with the way we’ve organized society.

Rather than clear articulations of the problem, however, so many of us walk around with a vague sense that something is wrong. Of course we want the genocide to be stopped, of course we want life to be less expensive, of course we want to be more connected. But what I see everywhere is a less defined feeling that something’s gotta give. The other day I heard it in a locker room, at the gym, in a small town.

As I changed to work out two men were talking about the State of the Union. One was clearly conservative and just pissed off at Biden, calling him divisive and plenty of other descriptive words. The other was less defined. He said something like “Yeah, you know, you can’t trust the right or the left these days.” But then he got into territory that was a little rockier. He talked, rightly, about how divided we are, before ending along the lines of “I don’t see how we get over this without a civil war.”