Family. Love. Trust. Empathy. Courage. Efficiency. Inner peace. Preparation.
When I spoke “good vibes” into the microphone, there was a collective chuckle throughout the room. Following an activity in which us RA’s-in-training narrowed down a list of ten values to our most important ones, I had been asked which value I’d selected, and I guess everyone was just waiting for me to throw up a shaka sign and say something endearing like “Peace, my brethren.”
As it stands, “good vibes” is a goofy phrase. Why shouldn’t it be? Pop culture has effectively stripped it of any meaning and reduced the phrase to a cliché representation of the hedonistic lifestyle. If you type it into Google, the first hit is a site of a dildo shop, for god’s sake. How much more pleasure-seeking can you get than that?
There’s something deeper missing from the public understanding. Good vibes aren’t about propagating pleasure at the expense of reality, forgoing conflict and tribulation to get raving drunk at a party that never ends on a yacht that never loses the sun’s caress. And, from a personal standpoint, the phrase improperly posits music festivals as places where drugs and hard music are an excuse for the type of behavior you wake up and regret.
“Aight,” you groan, “so what are good vibes about then, you short, frenetic neo-hippy?”
Resilience. Good vibes are all about resilience. As Ryan Reynolds says in "Deadpool," “Life is an endless series of train-wrecks with only brief, commercial-like breaks of happiness.” A bit pessimistic, but the world is a scary place and life is a test of resilience, where the ones who are set up to fight back negativity are the people who lead fulfilling lives.
This is where good vibes come into play. Say you break up with your significant other, get a crappy grade, and have a harrowing argument with your mom all in the same week. The emotional environment those types of problems create is easy to succumb to, because it’s easier to wallow in negativity than get up and fight it. But say you have a friend who is bullishly optimistic, you listen to uplifting music while musing on your thoughts, or even something simple as making sure your room is well-lit and endearingly decorated— these are characteristics of our lives that we can tap into and utilize in order to build resilience to the negativity life can bring.
So the point of good vibes is to structure an environment in which we can accept and understand the bad that inevitably affects all of us in a way that we can overcome it, as opposed to being drowned in a sea of turbulent emotion.
And this is why good vibes are my most important value. I’m no stranger to the debilitating calamities that this world can bring, whether it be in family, physical pain, or the choking of the mind. There have been too many moments in my life that felt like drowning, and there have been too many moments where I almost let go. But this is why establishing a benign, optimistic emotional environment wherever I go is so important to me— good vibes give me a panoply of emotional armor, they let me take a step back and understand the negativity instead of hating it, and they, perhaps most importantly, allow me to help my friends and random people alike to have brighter days and quieter nights.
So I’ll take the laughter. Hell, I’ll laugh along with you. Because there is a power in establishing good vibes that is undeniable to me, and for that, I will continue to smile when my world is crashing down and laugh lightly when I start the process of building it up again.
