Bad Vibrations

The internet's spiritual industrial complex wants us to ignore the world.

Earlier this year, my personal sickness for digestible quasi-spiritual material meant my algorithm fed me this video. It was made by a young British guy, a digital nomad content creator on TikTok who threatens to serve up “authenticity, adventures and real talk”. He says, in the self-ordained-life-coach cadence typical of that app, “Here’s a list of low vibrational things that I cut out of my life that no longer serve me…” 

The first one is The News. “Mate, cut that shit out,” he says. “There’s nothing but negativity on the news.” 

Recently, instead of being able to grapple with the inhumanity of what is happening in the Middle East, my brain chose to loop the memory of this man saying that The News no longer serves him. I wondered if he knew about people being massacred, displaced, anything of the historical context, the way people in places like the UK and US are being penalised for speaking about it. I wondered what he does know about. What does he think of the world we live in, if he thinks about it at all? The world that, as a digital nomad, he loves to endlessly travel around and enjoy. 

This thinking, or un-thinking, is not new. There have been plenty of captions and videos suggesting it lately but people in spiritual-healing-wellness online communities have been directly saying it for the past fifteen years, and they were probably saying it in the sixties: the news is low vibrational. That it is, spiritually speaking, “bad vibes”. I’ve seen influencers, coaches, healers and regular accounts operating in this area of the internet call lots of things low vibrational before: eating meat, thinking negative ideas, swearing, shopping, arguments, ‘mindless’ activities like watching TV or reading magazines. The belief is that if you allow these low vibrational states into your life, you will descend into more painful realms of existence. To embrace this line of reasoning encourages a nu-catholic self-flagellation, a route out of suffering via thought-policing. 

There was a natural logic to this niche material when I came across it online in my teens and early twenties because I desperately sought healing in anything, especially through abstinence (I still have to be vigilant around trying too hard to be perfect and painless through the lens of being well). Now this message is just part of the spiritual-wellness industrial complex on the internet that millions and millions of “normal people”—particularly young people—take for granted as practically conventional ideology. 

Pretty weird that being informed about what’s going on in the world is negative energy; that this is being readily adopted by young people who are consuming personal development, wellness and spiritual content in greater numbers than ever before; that looking after the self is being positioned as so directly counter to considering the collective. It gives me chills that ignorance could connote spirituality. Bad vibes, if you ask me!

When I went to look at that video earlier today, I saw that it’s now his top pinned video with over half a million views. In the comments, a British woman who seems to be in her early twenties has said, “Petition to be the generation that finally cancels the news !!!!” Someone else challenges this and her reply (after informing us that of course all news is manipulated) is an accidental snapshot of the psyche at hand: “If it’s important enough and going to impact us personally i’m sure we will hear about it via word of mouth.” 

Why should we only hear about what impacts us personally? Why would we assume that what harms others doesn’t harm us too? It’s all symptomatic of a misguided fetishization of individual healing narratives: if I ascend above everyone else, I will be okay and away from the human problems of those on the planet. To “spiritually bypass” these low vibrational feelings, thoughts and activities, is to see yourself as inherently disconnected from others, rather than a part of something larger. I do understand a need to disengage—people feel like they have no control, that they can’t trust any systems, that every input is stressful. I relate to the feeling of being beaten down by a lack of agency that’s honestly more to do with finances than anything else and have a lot of love in my heart for anyone who wants to feel better, regardless of whether this desire exists in an amorphous, unhelpful state.

But what is dark is that this ideology is not coming from people who have decided to disconnect from information, though it’s being framed as a personal choice in that way. None of these people have logged off—they are content creators and consumers. These are the growing numbers who give more weight to social media than the news; who are so addicted to social media that calling it low vibrational would simply not happen in any meaningful way.

It’s how the pipeline from wellness and spirituality content to conspiracy theories and paranoia exists. Though we seemingly no longer have any shared sense of reality—not a collective sense of time, mainstream culture or literal goings on—I believe we have a responsibility to try to possess a general awareness of what is happening in the world. Maybe especially because that reality is being lost. Not everything, not every twist and turn of traumatic events, but the broader movements of human life. 

It wasn’t that difficult to work out my own method of information intake through trial and error. The barriers to doing it sooner than a couple of years ago were intellectual laziness and that same addiction to numbing myself with my phone. I only allow for essential notifications and I come off social media for weeks and months at a time. Scrolling genuinely makes me believe that I don’t know how I feel and I don’t know what I’m doing. I black out then come to haunted, the emotional equivalent of a changeling, dumped there by tech bros, inhabiting what may or may not be my body.

When it comes to the news, I find it stressful when I’m only learning it through apps, infographics and opinion pieces, so I go on different newspaper websites every few days and do a targeted catch up on the news that way. When something big happens, I’ll research and talk about it with people smarter than me, people I trust, who won’t shame me for limited knowledge. I think it’s reasonable to expect this of ourselves—to all find our own way of working with information. 

It is work to know what’s going on, just as it always has been—you have to actively seek it out, compare sources, then use your comprehension skills to decipher the truth. To learn about the world and then adjust yourself appropriately, is, I think, to tune in to the last remaining frequency worth existing at.

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I haven’t written a lot recently. Here or anywhere. Sorry about that, especially if you’re a paid subscriber. I’m hoping that next year will bring some more space and time for writing. But two essays that I mentioned in my previous Substack newsletter are now online: my piece on intuition that was hanging around the Guardian most viewed top ten for a couple days, and this long-read about masculinity for GQ.