The vibe shift is here
The people hunger for joy
As long-time readers know, I have a working belief that the backlash to Trump is going to be a hunger for his exact opposite: Warmth, joy, decency, kindness, humanity, and collectivism.
I made a video about this on Instagram earlier this week, reflecting on the connection from Mamdani to Minneapolis to the Knicks, and I was bombarded in the comments and in my DMs with even more examples of big moments over the last 18 months that felt emblematic of where we’re culturally headed.
Let’s diagram this along a timeline.
To really see the change over time, you need to go back 18 months…
November 2024 thru spring 2025: Trump wins, and we hit rock bottom of the bad place. He wins the popular vote and therefore the elites believe he is popular so immediately acquiesce, showing that no amount of fuck-you money is enough to make them say fuck-you to a bully.
Top-level cowardice matters because a vibe shift cannot come from solely the top. Like all good movements, it must be bottom-up; a collective effort that is spurred forward by symbols and leaders but symbols and leaders alone are not enough to change the mood.
May 2025: Pope Leo is chosen as our first American pope! The memes and jokes begin flying. Pope Leo is about as good a pope as we can hope for, calling for better treatment of migrants, throwing shade at JD Vance, and speaking out for humanism and against AI.
June 2025: Zohran Mamdani wins the primary and we are reminded that actually, good can triumph over evil, and that hope is never foolish.
November/December 2025: Heated Rivalry airs on HBOMax (or whatever it’s called these days) and the discourse is flooded with pleas to please oh please take us to the cabin. Women especially (but not exclusively!) are taken in by a story of sweet, tender love and also hot butts. The show illustrated a very different kind of masculinity, in direct contrast to how the GOP is pushing gender norms right now.
January 2026: Minneapolis shows us what is possible in the fight against ICE, as Minnesotans come together in a way that would make Mr. Rogers proud. The same is true in Chicago, LA, Portland, and elsewhere — a sense of responsibility for their neighbors drove people to action.
February 2026: The Bad Bunny halftime show at the Super Bowl is pure undiluted joy (and incredible beats) and shows a version of America that is a direct rebuttal to what Trump and his ilk are trying to shove down our throats.
February 2026: The Olympics! Remember those?? Remember how fun it was to watch Alysa Liu when she won the gold with a style she cultivated completely on her terms? She was happy, authentic, and free.
April 2026: The Artemis II mission takes over the internet as four charming astronauts fly around the moon and delight us with their antics. We all get sucked in to the sense of awe at the glory, fragility, and vastness of space. (Plus, again, great memes.)
June 2026: The Knicks win the NBA championships and New Yorkers flood the streets in an outpouring of collective joy and effervescence, kicking off what feels like will be a Summer of Outside.
June/July 2026: The World Cup (or as TikTok is calling it, the Great American Slumber Party) comes to North America, and we are all treated to the delight and earnestness of getting to experience America through the eyes/stomachs/cameras of the world’s most exuberant soccer fans.
In her newsletter this week, Anne Helen Petersen asked: Is it a vibe shift … or is it the World Cup?
My answer is simple: Yes! Both!
A few things each of those events have in common:
Great content. It’s so silly to say that, but it’s true:
Each of those allowed the collective internet to talk about something fun/joyful/unifying in a way that made space for both humor and hope.
Memes in particular are powerful tools for creating a common culture and sense of tribe. For an event to be memeable is a compliment.
Those events and the ensuing content were also extremely funny, which matters in comparison to Trump. I remember this coming up in 2016: The man doesn’t laugh. He doesn’t really make jokes. He is just an angry orange ogre with no sense of humor. (He is sometimes objectively very funny, but never on purpose.)
Not politics but not a-political either! Only one of those was explicitly political (Zohran Mamdani’s win in 2025) but all speak directly to the political moment we’re in: A direct counter-argument to a top-down leader trying to beat us down, make us feel small, angry, divided, and very racist.
Fostering a sense of belonging. In 2017 I saw a presentation from a neuroscientist at NYU that talked about what the brain does when it encounters information that is obviously fake news — they specifically looked at MRIs of the brains of people who saw pictures of Trump’s inauguration and then heard Sean Spicer say it was the biggest inauguration ever. Even when then shown pictures of Obama’s inauguration (which was exponentially bigger), Republicans would refuse to accept reality. Their identity as “Trump voter” gave them the space to work through the cognitive dissonance.
The academic suggested that the way you break through that block and get people to incorporate new information that challenges their political identities is to appeal to a more important identity — parent, or patriot, or New Yorker, or Christian, or whatever makes sense for the moment.
What all these moments have in common is they create containers for belonging, which then fosters a new identity. The memes, as I mentioned earlier, are crucial here because they give the in-group a shared language.
Permission to hope. While I’m not sure the Obama Presidential Center opening broke through in the same way as everything else on this list (beyond my feed, and also because I was there!), I highly suggest watching both Obama’s speech and Zohran’s speech from the Knicks ceremony, which happened within a few hours of each other. Different tone, very similar themes, both connecting the dots between resilience, optimism, hope, and the work we do in the political sphere.
I’m not saying everything is good now.
But I believe we’re finally really shaking off the darkness of COVID and creating a cultural mood that can sustain us into November and beyond.
Vibes can’t save democracy but good vibes (and the stronger ties and more stubbornly optimistic attitude inherent in this mood) will be a necessary prerequisite for us to do the work.
Tell me what I’m missing — or leave a comment with your favorite content from any of the above events. 😎
When We’re in Charge is my leadership book for millennials and gen Z trying to do things differently. Pick up a copy in any format you’d like — hardcover, e-book, or audio book (narrated by yours truly) anywhere you get books, including Amazon or Bookshop.org or literally anywhere else. If you have Spotify Premium, you can listen to for free right this very minute. It’ll be out in paperback in September.
Yes it’s here.
Another moment is the Peace Walk, which carried me through winter. Seeing joyful people flock to see and hear the monks daily message of peace and loving kindness nourished my heart. Biggest vibe shift was seeing how police depts and first responders greeted and honored them.
This may not rise to the level of the Knicks win for allll sorts of reasons but the Carolina Hurricanes winning the Stanley Cup was incredibly good vibes. They are a team that always seems to be having an incredibly good time and as far as I know, their players have been pretty scandal-free, which seems to be difficult for any professional male athletes. Also the goalie for the other team (Las Vegas Golden Knights) is a rapist and the crowds kept chanting "no means no" at the games, which makes it even better that they lost.