This week, while promoting the universally-panned Liberal government’s two-month GST tax holiday, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland told Canadians that they are simply experiencing a “disconnect” between her Liberal government’s messaging on the state of the economy and their own practical day-to-day economic realities.
The fact we aren’t “feeling” the messaging that the economy is “set for a soft landing” is “not great” for our economy, we are told. It affects our economic behaviour. It’s so bad, in fact, that “a lot of economists” have gone so far as to diagnose the rejection of the Liberals’ economic outlook as a “vibecession.” If this ridiculous diagnostic term sounds like it came from a 25-year old TikTok influencer — that’s because it did.
Kyla Scanlon, a resident of Louisville Kentucky, has been described as an American financial content creator. To her credit, she does appear to have an undergrad from the Gordon Ford College of Business. Her coined term “vibecession” appeared on her Summer 2022 Substack where she asked her readers at the time, “Are we manifesting a recession?”
The post appears exactly as you might expect. It rambles in the pseudo-psychological self-help tone we’ve come to expect from Gen-Z: “I know that there is too much going on to even begin to process what is happening, and I am hoping to talk about *why* some of the stuff feels so weird and bad in this piece. I sincerely hope that you are doing okay.” Its opening stickman graphic suggests that, to solve our “vibecession,” we simply need to dam up the “discourse” from our river of bad vibes to prevent it from washing over our reality. It even includes a Charles Bukowski poem.
The same year, Scanlon’s theory that we are manifesting a poor economy rather than the more obvious explanation that we are suffering through one, somehow made it all the way to the New York Times as a guest essay titled, “The Vibes in the Economy Are …Weird. Really Weird.” Interestingly, the link to the study that purports to prove her theory that it is vibes and not our economic realities that affect our spending behaviours has since been “unalived.” The link is dead.
In 2024, Scanlon’s theory made it’s way to its proper home in “Cultural Vibrations: New Paradigms 2024,” a journal published by “thesis-led venture capital firm” Hannah Grey. One page of the journal titled, “Navigating the Vibecession,” is dedicated to Scanlon’s TikTok page. In fact, the entire page is screenshots of Kyla’s face on TikTok with topic thought bubbles including “Zuck goggles,” “confusing data,” and “Tswift nostalgia” — which I can only assume has something to do with Taylor Swift.
As of September this year, the Biden White House and Federal Reserve starting taking her musings as serious economic advice.
So, directly or indirectly, a 25-year-old Kyla Scanlon was the “economist” Freeland was referring to when she claimed the vibecession is on us.
But it’s not the fault, by any means, of a 25-year-old TikTok star that a major media outlet and governments have used her cultural musings as economic advice. That’s on them.
By Freeland’s logic, we all may have caused the “vibecession” by taking her anecdotal advice to cut our cost of living by cancelling our Disney Plus subscriptions.
Occam’s razor states the simplest explanation is usually the best, and here it is: People are not spending. And it isn’t because we have bad vibes.
Forgive me the personal anecdote, but groceries to feed my family of four cost $1000 a month not that long ago. Now, they cost over $1400. And it has nothing to do with making more extravagant choices. Likewise, gas prices have risen. None of this has to do with “feelings.” None of it has been manifested into existence by myself or other Canadians.
Don’t let the Liberal government gaslight you into accepting the cultural theories of a TikTok influencer as an explanation for your economic realities — what you’re experiencing is the very real effects of nine years of Liberal governance and poor polices. You did not bring this on yourselves.
National Post
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