#Vibe dc memes how to#

Two years after the start of a global pandemic that has killed millions around the world and nearly a million in the US and upended the lives of everyone on the planet, we find ourselves at a crossroads at every level of our lives. We have arrived at the mouth of the volcano. His fundamental question: “How can we cope with the fear, if we cannot overcome the causes of the fear? How can we live on the volcano of civilization without deliberately forgetting about it, but also without suffocating on the fears - and not just on the vapors that the volcano exudes?”

#Vibe dc memes how to#

Beck argued that we were actually in a “risk” society - a very cool, not-at-all-alarming name - an era of organizing ourselves in response to global, anonymous, invisible threats.īut Beck didn’t stop at naming it - he offered a way forward: a framework for how to live in a risk society. That we are “postmodern” tells you very little about what has replaced modernity. Beck was unsatisfied with that frame because “post-” is a negative definition. In the preface, he declares that he takes issue with the “post-” prefix at the time, everything was “post-” - postwar, postindustrial, postmodern, postcolonial.

He was grasping for a unifying theory, trying to name an ethos of anxiety and uncertainty, a pervasive vagueness of the age we were in. Two years before I was born, in the spring of 1986, German sociologist Ulrich Beck published the book Risk Society. American wars no longer had specific ideological enemies instead, they were fought against concepts - public opinion was mobilized to engage in a war on “terror.” The world was now unipolar, the US became the central axis around which the world spun. The general edicts of the rules-based order and liberal society have applied. In the West, it’s been understood as an era of stability in the early 1990s, one political scientist even suggested we’ve arrived at the “ end of history,” an argument that, following the triumph of Western liberal democracies over other arrangements of governments, there would be no going back.Īnd so it was for most of my life that history has been over. Burnham and I are in the middle range of millennials, a generation born into the longest period of global American supremacy, and we’ve been deeply shaped by this stretch. I was 3 by the time the Soviet Union collapsed. It’s vaguely dystopian, disoriented, unmoored.īurnham and I are roughly the same age. The song doesn’t work if the idea of a “stunning 8K resolution meditation app” doesn’t arouse something similar in you, too. Instead, he evokes a general notion that something is off. Except Burnham does not name the feeling. His verses are constructed of modern contradictions (“stunning 8K resolution meditation app”) and phrases that at face value are absurd (“the live-action Lion King”), while the chorus once again contends with the titular feeling. Two-thirds of the way through his claustrophobic 2021 comedy special Inside, Bo Burnham briefly strips away all the humor and launches into “ That Funny Feeling.” It’s an intimate, quiet song that draws its power from its lyrical conceit.