TIL: Vibecession

Many years (and a couple of jobs) ago, I was part of a weird corporate experiment that was referred to as “swim teams.” I’m not sure this was a thing except at my one company, but there is a business concept called “swimlanes” that I think might be related.  But, anyhow, what it was, was this: All the employees who were considered “squeaky wheels” were gathered up in a single room (and let me tell you, we were all looking around like, uh-oh), and were told that we were going to get assigned to one or two “swim teams,” and each team was going to work on one thing to make the business better.  That is, don’t just complain about the problems: participate in coming up with solutions.  And this was lovely, and a nice idea, and obviously it didn’t work at all.

You can probably guess why, but I’ll drill down a bit further.  One of my “swim teams” (I really can’t even type that without the air quotes) was called “employee engagement,” and it was one of the only ones—maybe the only one—where our actual CEO was on the team.  And, as she put it, the point of the team was to figure out how to get employees to treat the company as if it were their own, and not just a paycheck.  Our team came up with a number of good ideas, none of which were ever implemented.  One example: I proposed implementing financial transparency (long-time readers will recall this as cornerstone #1 of the Barefoot Philosophy).  The CEO was scandalized: let all the employees have all that sensitive financial data?  They can’t be trusted with that!  Then, a couple of weeks later, I was forced to listen to her rant on about how “employees these days” feel like they’re entitled to a job but they don’t want to work very hard for it.  And I thought to myself—very quietly, because there was no point in getting fired over a zinger—wait, you think you deserve employee engagement, but you won’t take any action that would earn that?  Who exactly is the party feeling entitled here?

But I tell you that story so I can tell you this one: I recently learned what ”vibecession” means.  It’s a topic of great interest in this political climate, with many high-level Democrats seeming to complain that people just aren’t understanding how good they’ve got it.  Unemployment is low! wages are up! the stock market is booming! interest rates on things like savings accounts are higher than they’ve been in most people’s entire lifetimes!  So why are people still complaining?  These silly consumers just need to understand what’s really going on so that they can understand how awesome the Biden presidency has been.  Hopefully they all wake up by the time the election rolls around.

But, you see, this attitude is exactly like my old CEO.  Faced with two contradictory situations—the status quo of economic indicators vs the attitudes of the common people—then obviously the status quo must be right and the people must be wrong (and also ungrateful).  I keep hearing so-called experts trying to work out how to spin the economic numbers so people will finally “get it.” What I don’t hear is anyone questioning whether it makes sense to keep using the same old numbers when they obviously don’t reflect how ordinary, non-academics are being impacted in the current economy.

They should maybe try that.  I don’t think they will, but they should probably try.  Just one man’s opinion.