I’ve always been very sensitive to vibes.
I mean, the kind of vibes are talking about these days when they talk about giving someone or someplace a “vibe check”. It’s the overall lingering emotional impression of them, kind of like the empathic equivalent of an odor, and for those of us sensitive to those kind of things, the feelings associated with the vibe can be quite powerful.
Trust me on that.
And for almost all of my life, I have considered those feelings to be entirely my business. It took a long time before it occurred to me that anyone else felt the same thing, even though intellectually I knew that I had heard people talking about them.
But to me, especially as a kid, they were just these weird feelings that came out of nowhere and forced me to have to deal with them all by myself because I didn’t want to ask anyone about them and have them think I was crazy.
They certainly made me feel like I was crazy sometimes, or on the way there at least. I’d be trying to deal with reality while these vibes were trying to make themselves heard, metaphorically speaking, in my head, and it made life stressful.
I honestly would have benefitted greatly from someone simply explaining that yes, this was a real thing, and I was not crazy, and that there were ways to integrate these psychic messages with the rest of my senses instead of fighting them all the time.
I could use that last part now, to be honest. I’m beginning to think that this vibe sensitivity might be a key part of my social anxiety as part of the stuff going on in my head when I am trying to interact with people that acts like a noisy radio station in my head that I have to work hard to ignore.
I honestly wish I could turn that shit down sometimes. Or off, even. Though I suppose if I did turn it off I would end up feeling incredibly lonely without these emotional impressions reminding me subconsciously that there ARE other people in the world living their lives and feeling their emotions.
So what the heck IS a vibe anyhow? I mean physically. Literally. Scientifically.
It has to be pheromones. That’s the only medium for these messages that makes any sense. I think that pheromones play a much larger part in our subjective lives than we understand or even recognize and it’s weirdos like me who notice them.
In fact, I think they play a key role in how there can be such a thing as a zeitgeist, which is basically a massive vibe. There is otherwise no avenue of rational explanation for how we can have a collective anything.
They are also an important component in empathy. Not the only component, of course. We get lots of info from things like vocal tone, posture, facial expression, and of course those minute shifts of tiny muscles in our eyes.
But there’s definitely a component beyond those things. Something you can pick up in the air without seeing anybody. A feeling of danger, for instance, or relaxed happiness, or jubilant celebration, or even those extremely volatile emotions that can turn a random group of people into a riot.
I know that for me, my subjective experience of vibes often feels more like electromagnetism than any sort of odor. Like my nervous system is acting as an antenna picking up signals from other people’s nervous systems.
I am sure science would not back me up on that, although I would love to see what happens if I go into a Faraday cage and am therefore isolated from absolutely everything in the electromagnetic spectrum.
Probably nothing. But maybe I would suddenly feel more relaxed than ever before.
It’s worth a shot.
More after the break.
More on vibe science
I like to joke (even though literally nobody else will ever find it funny) that I am the world’s only rational materialist mystic poet.
I guess you had to be there.
It’s my way of expressing the awkward tension between my fairly hardcore science and logic based mind and my deeply sensitive and empathic nature.
I don’t consider them to be in full on conflict but they don’t always get along.
When they do get along, for instances when I am writing (like right now), it’s like a mainline connection between my deeper self and the world outside my skull. The words flow out of me in a stream of consciousness and I get my emotions out of cold storage so I can express them and thus be rid of some of my heavy burden.
And I think I am getting better at that over time. The lowered Paxil dose helps a lot.
Much easier to have a stream of consciousness when you’ve thawed out.
I think I am also helped that despite my scientific mindset, I have stalwartly refused to participate in any kind of inane false dichotomy between STEM subjects and the arts.
In general, never tell me I have to pick a side. Fuck YOU.
I’m good at creative writing AND scientific reasoning. I can joke around AND I can discuss cosmology. I love philosophy AND brain science.
And I refuse to cut myself in half and abandon one half of myself just so that I fit into someone’s neat little box.
Fuck your boxes. I’m a custom job. Can’t figure out where to file me? Too bad. Guess you will have to get to know me instead.
And to me, the connection between the intuitive and the rational is crystal clear, though I doubt I could define it. To me, it all comes from the same deep and mysterious place in my mind. A mind which uses whichever faculty works best in any given situation and is made far more powerful than the two halves combined as a result.
Now if only I could use all that power to make some freaking money.
That’d sure be nice.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.