**Local Man Convinces Entire City The Moon Is ‘Just Vibing’ Tonight, Experts Weigh In**
Look, I get it. We’re all living in a post-truth hellscape where the weather app lies to your face, your boss expects you to be “excited” about the Q3 projections, and the only thing we can collectively agree on is that pineapple on pizza is a war crime. But even I was not prepared for the absolute circus that went down in Portland, Oregon last night when one local dipshit—I’m sorry, *visionary*—convinced the entire city that the moon was “just vibing” tonight.
Yes, you read that right. The moon. Our cold, dead, 4.5-billion-year-old rock. Vibing.
It started with a single tweet from a guy named Chad (of course). @ChadVibes_420 posted a grainy, potato-quality photo of a slightly hazy, orange-tinted moon at 9:14 PM PST with the caption: “bro look at the moon tonight, it’s literally just vibing. Like, no agenda, no drama, just pure lunar energy.” He then added a string of emojis that included a crystal ball, a peace sign, and a skull. Because nothing says “vibing” like a skull, I guess.
Within two hours, the tweet had 47,000 retweets. By midnight, it was the number one trending topic in the United States. CNN ran a crawl that said, “Moon ‘vibing’ tonight, experts say ‘it’s complicated’.” Fox News ran a segment where a guy in a bow tie argued that this was proof the lunar landing was faked and the moon is actually a hologram controlled by the Deep State. I am not making this up. I wish I was, because then I could go back to my quiet life of doomscrolling without having to explain to my mother why I’m now required to use the phrase “vibing” in reference to celestial bodies.
Let’s break this down, because I’m about to lose my goddamn mind.
The moon is not “vibing.” The moon is doing exactly what it has done for literally billions of years: it is orbiting Earth, reflecting sunlight, and occasionally making werewolves feel a little spicy. That’s it. It’s not “sending good energy.” It’s not “feeling the vibe.” It’s a rock. A big, cratered, airless rock. If you walked on the moon—which we did, six times, you conspiracy-huffing nutjobs—you would die instantly because it has no atmosphere and the temperature swings from -280°F to 260°F. That’s not “vibing.” That’s “aggressively trying to kill you.”
But no. The internet decided that Chad’s blurry photo of a slightly orange moon—which, by the way, was caused by wildfire smoke drifting down from Canada, not “vibes”—was the spiritual event of the decade. People started posting their own photos with captions like “feeling the lunar vibe 🍃✨” and “the moon is healing me tonight.” One woman on TikTok sobbed into her phone, claiming the moon “told her to leave her toxic boyfriend.” Girl, the moon is 238,855 miles away. It can’t even get a signal. It definitely doesn’t have opinions about your boyfriend’s vape pen collection.
And of course, the influencers had to get involved. A “spiritual wellness” account called @CosmicKarens (real, I checked) posted a $40 downloadable PDF titled “How to Align Your Chakras with Tonight’s Vibing Moon.” The PDF contained three pages of clip art, a poem about “lunar light,” and a QR code to buy essential oils. She made $12,000 in four hours. Twelve. Thousand. Dollars. For telling people the moon was “vibing.” Meanwhile, NASA is out here begging for $25 billion a year to actually study the thing, and they can’t even get a trending hashtag.
I called up an actual astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley. Let’s call him Dr. Not-Chad. He sighed so heavily I could hear his soul leave his body.
“The moon is not vibing,” Dr. Not-Chad said, his voice flat. “It is in its waxing gibbous phase, approximately 91% illuminated, and the orange hue is due to Rayleigh scattering and particulate matter in the atmosphere. That’s it. There is no vibe. There is no energy. There is no spiritual awakening. It is a satellite. It is a rock. Please stop emailing me asking if I can ‘feel the vibe’ from my telescope. I cannot.”
But the damage was done. By 2 AM, people were holding a “Lunar Vibe Vigil” in a park in Austin, Texas. Twenty-three people showed up. They lit candles, played a lo-fi beat, and stared at the moon for an hour. One guy brought a boombox and played “Stairway to Heaven.” Another guy tried to sell them all kombucha. A woman named Brenda told local news that she “finally understood her purpose” and was quitting her job as an accountant to become a “moonlight doula.” I’m not making that up either. She’s actually crowdfunding now.
The kicker? Chad, the original poster, later admitted he just took a photo of the moon through a dirty window and added a filter. He told a reporter, “I was high as balls, dude. I didn’t think anyone would actually believe me.” But he’s not apologizing. Why would he? He’s now got a sponsorship deal with a crystal shop and is planning a “Vibing Moon Tour” across the country. Tickets are $75. He’s selling out.
So here we are. We have a population so starved for meaning, so desperate for a sign that the universe gives a single shit about our mortgage payments and failed relationships, that we will latch onto a random dude’
Final Thoughts
After sifting through the usual hype of supermoons and blue moons, what struck me most about tonight's celestial show is its quiet defiance—a reminder that the moon, for all its predictable phases, never fails to feel urgent. Whether it’s a whisper of a crescent or a full, glaring orb, the real story isn’t in the calendar dates but in how it forces us to look up, to pause our scrolling and remember we’re all just standing on a spinning rock. In the end, the best advice I can give is simple: don’t waste it on a camera screen—let the cold, indifferent light wash over you for a minute, because that’s the only honest connection we ever get.