Why do you like people or music instantly — and not others?
You didn’t do a structured analysis. You didn’t create a pros-cons list. You just felt something click — and that was that.
The same goes for cities, coffee shops, relationships, products, and even presidents. Why Brad Pitt over Chris Evans? Why Tokyo over Paris? Toyota or Mercedes? Claude or GPT? Why does one place feel like home and another feel… off?
When I asked a sales lead for our B2B software what makes us win or lose a customer, I expected to hear about features, pricing, or buyer personas. But he shrugged and said, “Honestly, it mostly comes down to whether product managers or execs are on the call.”
There’s a pattern here. And it isn’t logic.
Most of us pretend we live like Spock, but we make decisions like jazz musicians — improvisational, intuitive, all feeling. From friends to lovers, brands to beliefs, the throughline in our choices isn’t reason. It’s resonance.
It’s mostly vibes.
“Vibes” is the best word we’ve found for that gut-level, pre-verbal, ambient sense of rightness — or wrongness — that attaches to people, places, brands, choices, aesthetics. It's a term that's both frustratingly vague and oddly precise.
We feel it when we walk into a room and just know something’s off. When someone’s energy makes us lean in, or recoil. When a song grabs us by the soul, even if we don't understand the lyrics.
We can't deny the existence and importance of vibes, but their inner workings still seem like woo. Lately, though, as I’ve been learning about large language models (LLMs), I have a theory.
Think about how LLMs process words. Every word is mapped to a billion-dimensional space — not a strict definition, but a cloud of meaning based on context, association, tone, frequency. The word “cool” can mean chilly, trendy, emotionally distant, or just… a vibe. The model doesn’t “know” what the word means. It just locates it in this billion-parameter matrix and runs some very fast math to figure out what probably comes next.
Everything in the universe is similarly infinitely multi-dimensional. Even you and our preferences are sprawling cloudforms in some psychological hyperspace.
Most of these dimensions and their values are opaque to you...the conscious mind. You only see a low-resolution, flattened version of reality projected up by your subconscious brain. You don’t perceive raw light or sound. You don’t track every sensory input in their base energy form. You see objects. You hear words. Your brain transforms the complexity into something coherent.
But underneath, your subconscious is operating at a much lower layer of abstraction. It's processing an impossible amount of raw signals or energy vectors from the universe, and performing millions of matrix multiplications (I imagine a more elegant and poetic version of that) every second to assess: Is this good? Safe? Worth it? Real? And the final compressed result is then beamed into your consciousness as a...vibe. Vibes aren’t irrational. They’re pre-rational. They’re the interface between the infinitely complex and the barely explainable.
We usually think of our consciousness as the pinnacle of intelligence. But I'm positing that it's merely a different framework of computation; another perspective to improve the answer; but one that we hold dear because it's the only thing we viscerally experience and understand. What's happening beneath the surface and all around, unbeknownst to us, is vastly more impressive and far richer. When the best artists and craftspeople are creating or performing, they aren’t thinking; they are mostly vibing.
The point is that vibes exist, they are powerful, and they are a result of your subconscious considering far, far more factors that are totally invisible to you.
So what do you do with that?
You might want to pay a lot more attention to vibes - both what you perceive and what you project.
Vibes aren't perfect. They’re shaped by our biases, traumas, upbringing, and culture. What feels "off" to you might simply be unfamiliar. Since vibes control behavior, there's also a ton of incentive to "hack vibes". It's probably the main reason why people and organizations lie. People can’t fake noble intentions or good products, but they can fake a vibe. Which is why your conscious mind still matters - to fact-check and override vibes.
For oneself, as an individual or as an organization, I recommend cultivating vibes through authenticity and expression. That involves understanding yourself well and expressing that fully and consistently. Not everyone will like your vibe. But your people will find you, and you'll find them. Trying to please everyone or being neutral is the ultimate vibe killer.
In the end, "it's mostly vibes" isn’t just a cheeky way to explain why you like the color blue or get a weird feeling around Jeff from accounting. It’s a world view — a whole epistemology.
We live in a reality too complex to fully explain, too layered to decode logically. Our minds can’t track every input. But it appears like our subconscious can do better.
You are a vibing being, in a vibing universe.
Tune in.
