It’s mostly vibes

A year ago, Aswath shared a post titled “It’s mostly vibes.” I’ve found myself thinking about it from time to time and I thought I’d share it in full.

Why do you like people or music instantly — and not others?

You didn’t do a structured analysis. You didn’t create a pros-cons list. You just felt something click — and that was that.

The same goes for cities, coffee shops, relationships, products, and even presidents. Why Brad Pitt over Chris Evans? Why Tokyo over Paris? Toyota or Mercedes? Claude or GPT? Why does one place feel like home and another feel… off?

When I asked a sales lead for our B2B software what makes us win or lose a customer, I expected to hear about features, pricing, or buyer personas. But he shrugged and said, “Honestly, it mostly comes down to whether product managers or execs are on the call.”

There’s a pattern here. And it isn’t logic.

Most of us pretend we live like Spock, but we make decisions like jazz musicians — improvisational, intuitive, all feeling. From friends to lovers, brands to beliefs, the throughline in our choices isn’t reason. It’s resonance.

It’s mostly vibes.

“Vibes” is the best word we’ve found for that gut-level, pre-verbal, ambient sense of rightness — or wrongness — that attaches to people, places, brands, choices, aesthetics. It’s a term that’s both frustratingly vague and oddly precise. 

We feel it when we walk into a room and just know something’s off. When someone’s energy makes us lean in, or recoil. When a song grabs us by the soul, even if we don’t understand the lyrics.

We can’t deny the existence and importance of vibes, but their inner workings still seem like woo. Lately, though, as I’ve been learning about large language models (LLMs), I have a theory.

Think about how LLMs process words. Every word is mapped to a billion-dimensional space — not a strict definition, but a cloud of meaning based on context, association, tone, frequency. The word “cool” can mean chilly, trendy, emotionally distant, or just… a vibe. The model doesn’t “know” what the word means. It just locates it in this billion-parameter matrix and runs some very fast math to figure out what probably comes next.

Everything in the universe is similarly infinitely multi-dimensional. Even you and our preferences are sprawling cloudforms in some psychological hyperspace. 

Most of these dimensions and their values are opaque to you…the conscious mind. You only see a low-resolution, flattened version of reality projected up by your subconscious brain. You don’t perceive raw light or sound. You don’t track every sensory input in their base energy form. You see objects. You hear words. Your brain transforms the complexity into something coherent.

But underneath, your subconscious is operating at a much lower layer of abstraction. It’s processing an impossible amount of raw signals or energy vectors from the universe, and performing millions of matrix multiplications (I imagine a more elegant and poetic version of that) every second to assess: Is this good? Safe? Worth it? Real? And the final compressed result is then beamed into your consciousness as a…vibe. Vibes aren’t irrational. They’re pre-rational. They’re the interface between the infinitely complex and the barely explainable.

We usually think of our consciousness as the pinnacle of intelligence. But I’m positing that it’s merely a different framework of computation; another perspective to improve the answer; but one that we hold dear because it’s the only thing we viscerally experience and understand. What’s happening beneath the surface and all around, unbeknownst to us, is vastly more impressive and far richer. When the best artists and craftspeople are creating or performing, they aren’t thinking; they are mostly vibing. 

The point is that vibes exist, they are powerful, and they are a result of your subconscious considering far, far more factors that are totally invisible to you. 

So what do you do with that? 

You might want to pay a lot more attention to vibes – both what you perceive and what you project. 

Vibes aren’t perfect. They’re shaped by our biases, traumas, upbringing, and culture. What feels “off” to you might simply be unfamiliar. Since vibes control behavior, there’s also a ton of incentive to “hack vibes”. It’s probably the main reason why people and organizations lie. People can’t fake noble intentions or good products, but they can fake a vibe. Which is why your conscious mind still matters – to fact-check and override vibes. 

For oneself, as an individual or as an organization, I recommend cultivating vibes through authenticity and expression. That involves understanding yourself well and expressing that fully and consistently. Not everyone will like your vibe. But your people will find you, and you’ll find them. Trying to please everyone or being neutral is the ultimate vibe killer.In the end, “it’s mostly vibes” isn’t just a cheeky way to explain why you like the color blue or get a weird feeling around Jeff from accounting. It’s a world view — a whole epistemology. 

We live in a reality too complex to fully explain, too layered to decode logically. Our minds can’t track every input. But it appears like our subconscious can do better. 

You are a vibing being, in a vibing universe.

Tune in. 

em-dashes

I did some writing growing up — it was part of the curriculum — but not in the way writing is taught in the United States. As a result, my grasp of punctuation and sentence structure has been something I’ve picked up along the way rather than because of formal education.

I know there’s still plenty of room for improvement, but it is a journey.

One of the more surprising recent lessons on this journey has been about em dashes.

Anyone who’s worked with LLMs over the past couple of years knows they love an em dash. It’s become something of a tell for AI-generated writing. My takeaway from noticing this was actually the opposite of what you might expect — I realized I’d been using hyphens where em dashes belonged all along.

So, in a funny way, I’m grateful. These models inadvertently taught me something about English punctuation I should have known sooner. You’ve been seeing more em dashes around here lately. I hope to continue using them in the right places.

Getting rid of annoying habits

The key to getting rid of our annoying habits is reaching the point in our self-awareness where those habits annoy us as much as they annoy everyone else.

This requires two things.

First, we need to remove the defensiveness that stops us from honestly acknowledging how our actions land with others.

Second, we need to begin catching ourselves in the act — awareness during the action precedes awareness before the action.

This is easier said than done. But when we get here, we remove all the emotional barriers.

And the emotional barriers are the only barriers that matter.

Earn your stripes

Early in my career, a friend pulled me aside with a simple piece of advice. As an ambitious person, you’re going to have a lot of ideas for things you want to change. But first, earn your stripes.

Show your impact. Then use the influence that comes from that to make the changes you want.

It is an idea I think about every time I’m in a new situation. Or often when watching someone else navigate one.

The temptation in any new role is to lead with the wish list. To flag what’s broken, to push for what should be different, and to make your presence felt. And sometimes that instinct comes from a genuinely good place. Our fresh eyes help us clearly see things that are broken.

Earning our stripes isn’t just about holding off on the asks. As we focus on impact, we start to understand the why behind how things are — and we have to understand why before we can thoughtfully ask why not. That process helps us separate the changes that matter from the noise. Our wish list inevitably gets shorter, sharper, and involves the right sequence of steps.

The changes that actually stick almost always come from someone who did that work first. They used the time to understand the context and then used their understanding to push for what was worth pushing for.

Show up, make an impact, learn the why. The ability to make the changes that matter follows.

Maybe his back hurts

I love Morgan Housel’s writing. I was thinking about a story he shared in a post earlier in the year. It’s a great post, one I thought I’d share in full.

I broke my back skiing when I was a teenager. It’s still screwed up and I occasionally tweak it, leaving me in agony for a few days. When I’m in pain I’ve noticed: I’m irritable, short-tempered, and impatient. I try hard to not be, but pain can override the best intentions.

One lesson I’ve tried to learn is that whenever I see someone being a jerk, my knee-jerk reaction is to think, “What an asshole.” My second reaction is: maybe his back hurts.

It’s not an excuse, but a reminder that all behavior makes sense with enough information. You can always see people’s actions, but rarely (if ever) what’s happening in their head.

Here’s a related point: Most harm done to others is unintentional. I think the vast majority of people are good and well-meaning, but in a competitive and stressful world it’s easy to ignore how your actions affect others.

Roy Baumeister writes in his book Evil:

Evil usually enters the world unrecognized by the people who open the door and let it in. Most people who perpetrate evil do not see what they are doing as evil. Evil exists primarily in the eye of the beholder, especially in the eye of the victim.

One consequence of this is that it’s easy to underestimate bad things happening in the world. If I ask myself, “How many people want to cause harm?” I’d answer “very few.” If I ask, “How many people can do mental gymnastics to convince themselves that their actions are either not harmful or justified?” I’d answer … almost everybody.

An iron rule of math is that 50% of the population has to be below average. It’s true for income, intelligence, health, wealth, everything. And it’s a brutal reality in a world where social media stuffs the top 1% of moments of the top 1% of people in your face.

You can raise the quality of life for those below average, or set a floor on how low they can go. But when a majority of people expect a top 5% outcome the result is guaranteed mass disappointment.

I think the majority of society problems are all downstream of housing affordability. The median age of first-time homebuyers went from 29 in 1981 to 40 today. But the shock this causes is so much deeper than housing. When young people are shut out of the life-defining step of having their own place, they’re less likely to get married, less likely to have kids, have worse mental health, and – my theory – more likely to have extreme political views, because when you don’t feel financially invested in your community you’re less likely to care about the consequences of bad policy.

Every economic issue is complex, but this one seems pretty straight forward: we should build more homes. Millions of them, as fast as we can. It’s the biggest opportunity to make the biggest positive impact on society.

I heard someone say recently that the reason so many people are skeptical AI will improve society – or are terrified it will do the opposite – is because it’s not clear the internet (and phones) made their life better.

That’s a subjective point, but it got me thinking: Imagine if you asked people 25 years after these things were invented whether life was better or worse because of their existence: Electricity, radio, airplane, refrigeration, air conditioning, antibiotics, etc.

I think nearly everyone would say “better.” It wouldn’t even be a question.

The internet is unique in the history of technology because there’s a list of things it improved (communication, access to information) but another list of things it likely made worse for almost everybody (political polarization, dopamine addiction from social media, less in-person interaction, lower attention spans, the spread of misinformation.)

There aren’t many examples throughout history of technology so universal with so many obvious downsides relative to what existed before it. But the wounds are so fresh that it’s not surprising many look at AI with the same fear.

This is more hope than prediction, but I wouldn’t be surprised if in 20 years we look back at this era of political nastiness as a generational bottom we grew out of.

There’s a long history of Americans cycling through how they feel about government and how politicians treat each other.

The 1930s were unbelievably vicious. There was a well organized plot to overthrow Franklin Roosevelt and replace him with a Marine general named Smedley Butler, who would effectively become dictator. The Great Depression made Americans lose so much faith in government that the prevailing view was, “hey, might as well give this a shot.”

It would have sounded preposterous if someone told you in the 1930s that by the 1950s more than 70% of Americans said they trusted the government to do the right thing almost all the time. But that’s what happened.

And it would have sounded preposterous in the 1950s if you told Americans within 20 years trust would collapse amid the Vietnam War and Watergate.

It would have sounded preposterous if you told Americans in the 1970s that within 20 years trust and faith in government would have surged amid 1990s prosperity and balanced budgets.

And equally absurd if you told Americans in the 1990s that we’d be where we are today.

Cycles are so hard to predict, because it’s easier to forecast in straight lines. What’s almost impossible to detect in real time is the same forces fueling public opinion plant the seeds of their own demise. When times are good, people get complacent and stop caring about good governance. When times are bad they get fed up and say, “Enough of this.” And I think we’re not far from that today.

I have a theory about nostalgia: It happens because the best survival strategy in an uncertain world is to overworry. When you look back, you forget about all the things you worried about that never came true. So life appears better in the past because in hindsight there wasn’t as much to worry about as you were actually worrying about at the time.

A renewed phone and a good human

Every few months, I replace my phone’s screen protector. The replacement ships over from whichever company I bought it from, and then I head to an AT&T store (as they’re who I buy my phones from) to request help from a representative put it on. There’s real art and science to doing it without bubbles.

Every time, I walk out feeling like I’ve been handed a new phone. That brief window before I inevitably drop it and scratch the whole thing up at any rate.

But the bigger thing I walk away with is gratitude. These representatives take a few minutes out of their day to do something like this for free, and I’ve never been met with anything other than generosity.

It’s one of those small moments that reminds me how many good humans are out there.

I’m grateful for them.