My concern here is not that people aren’t taking Trump’s threat seriously enough (even if they aren’t) or that Biden isn’t getting some of the credit he deserves (even if he isn’t). Rather, the political reactions of American voters seem completely detached from anything that’s happened over the past several years, or even from things that are happening right now. We use vibes to talk about all of this: We’re not in an actual recession, just a “vibecession,” where people feel like it’s a recession.
But you can’t solve imaginary recessions with real policies, just as you can’t cure imagined diseases with real medicine. We are experiencing a kind of political and economic hypochondria, where our good test results can’t possibly be true.
I tend to think I'm still in touch with Reality, but, like Nichols, I'm not sure whether my fellow citizens have much a sense of it anymore. I'm no longer sure to what degree techno-capitalism and the ontological dizziness it has engendered has pushed Americans into some virtual reality and out of the real one.
There's no easy cure for that. The question is how many of us are in the throes of this vertigo?
We'll know by this time next year.
See also Reality: Nice While It Lasted 2.