Bring on the Vibe Shift!
Gone with the obsession with wealth transfer. The post-pandemic generation is building its own wealth.
Two years ago, right at the start of the pandemic, I did a Forbes interview with L Wintermeyer “Rebooting The Global Economy After Coronavirus: Physical Scarcity To Digital Abundance”. I made one point: separate the physical and digital economies. Why? The physical world is scarce, there are planetary upper boundaries. (Can we please hit the pause button on torching the planet? Thank you.) But digital has no bounds. We have to find ways to untie the death knot. Fast forward two years, all predictions of the cascading climate crisis have come true and thanks to Facebook’s meta moves (all puns intended), it’s now clear to one and all that era of “digital abundance” is upon us.
Now an article from New York Magazine’s “The Cut” proclaims “A Vibe Shift is Coming.” Mmm, yeah. That’s very nice. I hate fast fashion but I seriously have no inspiration to wear the stuff in my wardrobe I picked over the past two years. So it’s probably true, there is no going back. See I am a bit of an outlier, I divorced myself for pandemic blues back in June 2020 when I moved to Hawai’i. No antidepressants for this girl here. I like coconut water instead. No pajamas. Sundresses instead. I worked my ass off this whole time so sat on my desk a lot — not watching Netflix (no TV and TV subscriptions in this house) but then, I explored the islands. The pandemic was a difficult time for business — how do you monetize resilient optimism when it’s (to a great degree, avoidable) death and gloom all around? Only psychopaths can optimize gloom and doom. (Ahem, hello, Wall Street. Been a while.)
Back in my university days in Italy, I wrote my class assignment on how the handicraft industry should be treated as a creative industry (like pop culture, music, art) instead of a subsistence industry (like agriculture). Because a section of the population is poor, capitalism assumes that they are worthless. Their art, skills, peculiarities, way of life, happiness, and struggles are not important. Send in the World Bank to provide development aid! “Trade, not aid,” says Africa! (Full disclosure: my company works with the World Bank to mainstream gender in the public sector — yeah, that’s a thing.) Except that trade is hijacked too. Do you really want to empty your country of all its precious resources?
So look, I am all for the vibe shift. Bring in the cool kids who are building their own wealth. (Hello metaverse, NFTs, DeFi!). Shift the vibe from clients who tell you they are doing you a favor by giving you business when you have worked your ass away. (What kind of work culture?!) No, customers are not always right. Many times, they are just assholes. (Another disclosure, I curated a summit on the Future of Work in March 2021 with the awesome N Parasker.)
Shift the vibe from obsessing over how to earn money from the very few that control almost all of it. Shift the vibe towards valuing culture and art. Not because now you can put a dollar amount on it, but because capitalism is not the end all be all of the human creativity. Vibe shift needed to make coconut clubs cool. Vibe shift for better health marketing campaigns, ‘cos we are gonna be living until 90-100. (I’d like to have my organs functioning well, thank you). I don’t need rappers to tell me about ‘reality’, I can teach you the REAL reality of economics, money, and human psychology. Can some cool Econ kids please stand up? Vibe shift needed to get the fear-mongering out of the way. Vibe shift needed from bloody patriarchy. Bring in the poets, the brave-hearts, the creatives, and the cantadoras (google Dr. Clarissa Estes). I like the vibe of wild-fierce women and men who know their glory.
Bring on the vibe shift!
I run The Digital Economist ecosystem, combining the imaginative use of technology and the mastery of tools to become a steward of the planetary global economy.
‘Economy’ from the Greek word ‘oikonomia’ which means ‘household management’ — our planetary household. ‘Digital’ represents augmented human capabilities through technology, which is a means to crystalize human imagination.
