is everyone okay or is it all just vibes now?

on soul fatigue, digital noise, and remembering how to feel real again

stepfanie tyler

May 01, 2025

a buzz of misalignment

it’s not dramatic.

there’s no collapse. no explosion. no moment where it all clearly fell apart.

just this strange, persistent tension under everything.

like everyone’s running a little off.

like we all collectively forgot how to be real and are too embarrassed to admit it.

the conversations still happen.

the memes still land.

the productivity still… produces.

but underneath, something’s drifting.

it’s not that we don’t know what’s going on. the information is there.

every opinion. every chart. every narrative thread.

we’re not in the dark—we’re in the glare.

and i think that’s the issue.

we’ve got god-tier tools, infinite knowledge, and more creative power than any generation in history.

but the emotional signal is weak.

we’re optimizing for everything except feeling alive.

no one’s asking “are you okay?” and actually meaning it.

because no one wants to hear the real answer.

because we’re not even sure what the answer would be.

it’s not depression. not exactly.

not burnout, either.

just this buzz of misalignment.

a sense that your life is running a few seconds ahead of your soul.

and it’s easy to ignore.

especially when your calendar’s full and your feed is interesting and your life looks fine from the outside.

but when you stop moving—even for a second—you can feel it.

like your spirit is watching your body live a slightly different life.

everything works, but nothing feels right

this is the strange part.

life is easier in almost every measurable way.

you can order food without speaking.

start a business from your couch.

talk to a chatbot that sounds wiser than your therapist.

get a thousand takes on any topic without ever forming your own.

and somehow, it still feels like we’re missing the plot.

like the systems are running, but the human signal inside them is getting weaker.

maybe it’s not a failure of technology.

maybe it’s a failure of alignment.

we built tools to save us time, but now no one knows what to do with stillness.

we solved convenience, but forgot how to savor.

we made everything faster—content, communication, feedback loops—but we never stopped to ask if our nervous systems could handle it.

most people i know are deeply in their lives, but barely in themselves.

and i don’t mean that in some abstract poetic way. i mean they’re on autopilot.

scrolling while talking. reacting instead of thinking.

burning through their dopamine reserves before noon.

then wondering why nothing hits anymore.

we’re not lacking stimulation.

we’re lacking resonance.

things happen to us, around us, through us—but not within us.

it’s like living through a pane of glass: you see it all, but nothing quite lands.

and when it does, it’s usually after the fact—delayed emotion, posthumous meaning.

i don’t think it’s because people are lazy or shallow or broken.

i think we just lost our internal pacing.

our bodies are trying to metabolize futures we haven’t spiritually caught up to yet.

and no one taught us how to slow down without feeling like we’re falling behind.

the vibes economy

at some point, we stopped measuring truth in facts.

we started measuring it in tone.

does it feel confident?

does it sound right?

does it have that clean, understated, sans-serif energy we’ve all been trained to trust?

okay, then it must be true.

we don’t follow ideas anymore—we follow moods.

you can feel it online especially: some people just have the right energy.

they could say anything. doesn’t matter. the syntax is tight. the aesthetic lands. the font’s good.

vibes secured.

but it’s not just internet culture—it’s everywhere.

politics has become performance art.

media’s a collage of outrage and ASMR.

even friendships are being filtered through whether someone “feels aligned” with your “frequency.”

i’m not above it.

i’ve caught myself closing out of articles not because they were wrong—but because the tone was annoying.

i’ve scrolled past someone’s heartbreak post and paused longer on a meme.

not because the meme mattered.

just because it vibed better.

it’s wild how easy it is to forget the content of something if the mood is right.

we’ll call it “brilliant” or “important” because it had that little serotonin click.

we’ll trust it because it feels like the kind of thing smart people say.

but this is how people get manipulated.

this is how midwits become prophets.

how entire movements rise and fall based not on logic or ethics or truth—but on ambiance.

there’s no baseline anymore. just mood swings at scale.

you’re whiplashed between aesthetics, values, identities, worldviews, every time you open your phone.

and the worst part is: you think you’re choosing.

but mostly, you’re just vibing.

(and hoping your nervous system keeps up)

techno-spiritual lag

i’m not anti-tech.

i’m not anti-AI, anti-progress, anti-speed.

i actually think we’re living in the most fascinating, high-leverage moment in human history.

but i also think we’re spiritually under-upgraded for the tools we’ve built.

it’s not the technology that’s hollow.

it’s us—when we forget to bring our interior world along with it.

we’re evolving faster than we know how to feel.

the apps are improving. the models are training. the interfaces are frictionless.

and we’re still sitting there, wondering why we feel foggy and fragmented.

this isn’t a crisis of information.

it’s a crisis of integration.

most people have more access to knowledge, power, and creation than kings did a hundred years ago.

but they’re still waking up feeling like they’re drowning in noise.

and when you ask them what they actually want from life, they don’t know.

they just want the anxiety to stop.

we need better rituals, not better reminders.

not another calendar app. not another habit tracker.

we need spaces for orientation—to recalibrate the self before the scroll.

to remember what it feels like to think a thought that wasn’t fed to you.

we don’t need to slow technology down.

we need to speed the soul up.

and maybe that doesn’t mean rushing anything—maybe it just means catching up to ourselves.

maybe it means finally sitting in stillness long enough to remember our original frequency.

not the one the feed is tuning you to.

the one that existed before all that.

quiet rooms

i keep thinking about my night out in the desert.

no cell service. no noise. no algorithm.

just stars that didn’t care who i was, and wind came and went as it pleased.

i’d taken shrooms earlier that evening—not to escape, but to listen.

and for the first time in a long time, i actually could.

to the stillness. to the land. to myself.

not as a brand, not as a voice, not as someone optimizing her life—

just as a human body in a real place, feeling the earth breathe underneath her.

there was no insight that “came through,” no message from the cosmos.

it was quieter than that.

more cellular.

like the part of me that always knew how to be… finally got a chance to speak.

i actually wrote about it already (you can read more here),

but what stayed with me wasn’t the high.

it was the memory of silence.

of being in a world that didn’t need anything from me.

not a reaction. not a post. not even a thought.

just presence.

that’s the kind of room i think more of us are craving.

not a retreat from modernity, but a return to something older than language.

not “disconnecting,” but remembering.

and no—you don’t need psychedelics or a desert to feel it.

you just need a calm, quiet room.

the kind that isn’t shaped by data.

the kind that doesn’t perform back at you.

building the soul back into the system

i don’t think we need to delete the internet, or throw our phones into the ocean, or pretend we’re going back to some romanticized pre-digital purity.

i just think we need to reintroduce the soul into our systems.

to make presence a default setting again.

for me, it’s not that complicated.

i take long walks—two or three miles a day, without music.

just me, my dogs, my thoughts, and whatever is trying to surface underneath them.

i lift a few times a week, not to hit some goal, but because it keeps me in my body.

and sometimes i just sit in the bath for an hour doing absolutely nothing.

no phone. no podcast. no stimulation.

just water, silence, and the slow untangling of whatever’s gotten knotted up.

those moments don’t go viral.

they don’t get shared.

they don’t “scale.”

but they feel like mine.

and that might be enough.

there’s so much power in doing something for no reason except that it steadies you.

not to fix. not to improve.

just to witness yourself being a person.

because once you remember that feeling—the clarity, the softness, the grounding—you start to see how much of modern life is designed to pull you away from it.