We've been here before. The symptoms repeat across time with eerie consistency. Politics feels paralyzed—parties fight but solve nothing. Leaders are reactive, never visionary. Jobs become transactional hell. Work becomes about survival, not meaning. The news is background static—constant crisis with no resolution. Everything feels heavy and gray and dead.

These cultural flatlines run seven to twelve years. Not just economic recessions—vibes recessions, where optimism, creativity, and boldness all go quiet at once. Like the entire species just decides to sleepwalk through a decade.

We're roughly five to seven years into our current fuckity-fuck cycle. It started somewhere between 2016 and 2020, depending on whether you trace it to political breakdown, pandemic fallout, or cheap money funding the latest tech expansion. If the historical pattern holds, we're in the lame, ugly middle phase—not the start, not the end. Just the long slog where everything feels stuck.

But here's what I found digging into this pattern: these gray periods always end with an explosion of color, creativity, and possibility. Always.

The late-70s malaise birthed MTV, punk, hip-hop, Silicon Valley, and the personal computer revolution. The Depression birthed New Deal reforms, the jazz golden age, and the technological leaps of wartime innovation. The 1890s gloom birthed the Progressive Era, Art Nouveau, and entirely new ways of thinking about society and power.

And right now, if you zoom in, you'll see these sparks everywhere—the little rebellions that always show up before culture starts to crack open, people fracturing and retreat into smaller, weirder spaces. Discord servers, niche newsletters, invite-only forums—replacing public timelines and algorithmic communities. Artists and writers are making things no one asked for—mashups and music scenes. Magazines, cassette players, film cameras, typewriters, even landlines coming back. Not just nostalgia. A hunger for tactile experience.

There's a rebellion brewing against productivity culture and optimization—end the hustle bullshit. People are walking away from performative jobs. Quiet quitting, career downsizing, anti-resume movements. The "slow work" ethos is catching on and new vocabulary is emerging: "post-ambition," "enoughness," "human-scale."

Gen Z are less tribal and more willing to abandon party identity entirely. There's a rising desire for rebuilding community from scratch. Not as an ideology. As survival. That "start over from the ground up" mindset is the same one that fed the Progressive Era after the 1890s malaise.

Analog games—D&D—are surging because people are starved for real-world fun. Public parks and civic spaces are quietly reviving in some cities. Humor, that isn't built for brands, is on the rise. When a society starts rediscovering silliness, that's a sign it's thawing out.

This is how revolutions always start: messy, half-baked, dismissed, until suddenly, it's the new normal. We have to be the change that we want to see.

All of this is pre-mainstream energy. Unformed, chaotic, often dismissed as niche or "not serious." That's exactly how every post-malaise wave looks at first. If you want to spot the next MTV/punk/PC moment before it lands, watch these sparks. Be these sparks! Getting out of the bullshit we’re in comes from doing and making—the half-baked projects and grass roots initiatives that people roll their eyes at.

Everything feels awful right now, you're not imagining it. You're not broken. You're living through a historical pattern that always, eventually, breaks. The question isn't whether things will get better again. It's whether you'll be ready to help break it when your moment comes. Be ready to roll your d20.

The fuckity-fuck cycle we’re in right now.