on vibing

“Humans are not meant to keep exact time,” the Native poet Sandra Ball once said. “We are meant to live within the confines of seasons, light and dark, and our own body’s rhythms, which are not the same from day to day or from year to year.”

This notion of time as an “economic resource” is exactly what vibing aims to break away from...  time is not an empty thing we have to fill but a living thing that we must shape. Time changes. Because the world changes, and we change with it. To vibe is to shape time into pleasure, to mold it into something that feels soft and tastes sw

eet.

Afrofuturism is typically defined as a Black cultural aesthetic that explores the intersections of the African diaspora and technology––or, in other words, a form of Black science fiction.

Black writer and performer Neema Githere writes about what she calls “ Afropresentism ,” which she defines as a “teaching genre” that “channels your ancestry thr

At the most basic level, I think, vibing requires acknowledging an energy, one that cannot be measured or poured, but is powerful enough to render you breathless, or swallow you whole. It means not doing anything, and yet not doing nothing; refusing a schedule, ignoring your watch, but still filling days with intention, somehow.

“In a situation where every waking moment has become the time in which we make our living,” Odell notes, “and when we submit even our leisure for numerical evaluation via likes on Facebook and Instagram, constantly checking on its performance like one checks a stock, time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on ‘nothi

These moments are not corporeal, they are a nod to the senses. A texture; a color. The black of ink; the kiss of rain. These things define the vibe while simultaneously freeing it from the burdens of definition, taking us urgently out of the body and transporting us to someplace softer, almost liminal.

vibes exist where time does not.

While baking is an unquestionably sweeter activity than any sort of grind, many quickly found this did nothing to curb burn out or exhaustion. Ca

pitalism not only defines how we spend our time, but our relationship to the things we fill our time with. Are you knitting a scarf to learn a new skill, to indulge in a pleasure, to take breaks from labor

To labor under capitalism is to enter negotiations between the arbitrary constructions of money and time. It is to be asked: How much is 60 minutes of survival worth to you? And to answer, For how long must I labor to earn the right to survive?

Vibes are difficult to write about because the concept intentionally defies definition. Merriam Webster’s best attempt is “a distinctive feeling or quality capable of being sensed.” I agree, but I would add: not ev

eryone can sense it.