Is Romanticism making a comeback in SF?

I’ve lived in SF for more than a decade. Lately I’ve noticed an assortment of things that have made me think SF might be in the early stages of a ‘Romantic Revival’ of sorts.

Observations

Things that used to signal a ‘lack of seriousness’ but that now feel increasingly ‘high-status’:

• Aesthetics. Dressing well used to be a negative signal (‘he’s focused on the wrong things’), while today serious people in tech are starting to pay attention to how they dress. Same with caring about beauty in the built environment. Beauty, in general, is increasingly in vogue.

• Emotion & EQ. Being ‘high EQ’—or at least being able to talk intelligently about emotions—feels higher status than it has in the past. Seems especially true for men.

• Mysticism. It’s increasingly acceptable to have some ‘unexplainable’ beliefs or rituals—religion, woo, tarot, witchy vibes. These kinds of beliefs wouldn’t have been openly talked about ten years ago in SF, at least in most circles.

• IRL spaces. Wanting to open a diner, a bookstore, a modern-day country club, a wine bar—not because it’s a great business but for fun/’for vibes.’ Ten years ago I think these things would largely have been seen as a waste of time (‘they don’t scale’), but are now all very much in the zeitgeist.

• ‘Lite’ hedonism. Feels increasingly ‘cool’ to want to have fun versus just grind all the time. At least amongst some subgroups, drinking is on the rise, as is the occasional cigarette. Feels transgressive or rebellious (in a ‘cool’ way) when contrasted with SF’s efficiency, longevity, biohacking subcultures.

Possible drivers

• AI forcing the ‘What makes us human?’ question. People are thinking about what differentiates us from AIs. Different but perhaps related: a search for authenticity when ‘everything looks the same.’

• Nihilism, driven by both AI and global politics. Heightened uncertainty and perceived lack of control leading to feelings of ‘What’s the point?’ I actually don’t get the sense that the emotional valence of said nihilism is necessarily negative, at least in the context of AI. More like: ‘AGI is coming and it’s going to change everything…why should I put so much effort into X thing I’m working on when AI will just figure it out in Y years?’

• Growing fatigue with somatic self-control. In part pent-up reaction to COVID (not SF-specific), and in part pushback against the biohacking and longevity movements (more SF-specific) that tend to be quite physically regimented/restrictive. People wanting to ‘live and let loose.’

• Rising loneliness/atomization (accelerated by COVID). Already well known that people are craving community, physical spaces, human connection, etc.

Pattern matching

Have we seen something like this before? At least three historical examples come to mind, where rationalism or crisis triggered a swing back to the more emotional, mystical, and embodied:

1. Enlightenment → Romanticism (late 18th to mid-19th c., primarily Europe)

2. WWI-era rationalism and militarism → Weimar-era cultural explosion (1919–1933, Germany)

3. 1950s technocracy and conformism → 1960s counterculture (1950s–1970s, SF+)

Extrapolating

Are we in the early stages of something similar, and if so, what might this end up looking like? Perhaps a resurgence in some combination of humanism and hedonism (loosely defined):

• Humanism: Search for the soul and what makes us uniquely human. Maybe more focus on art, imperfection, beauty, authenticity, meaning, feelings. Return to IRL-ness, physical spaces, community. Aesthetic maximalism, renewed interest in old things/the classics.

• Hedonism: “Who knows what the future holds, let’s have fun and enjoy life.” Embracing sensory experiences and fun as worthy pursuits, valuing spontaneity and living in the moment over constant optimization/productivity. (I’ll admit that it’s hard for me to imagine SF going off the rails here so I’m using hedonism in a rather light sense.)

Questions

While I have a moderately strong hunch about this, I see a limited slice of SF, so it’s very possible this is wrong! I’m curious what others are observing:

• Is this shift real? If so, among which subsets of SF culture? Why is it happening?

• If it is real and it continues, what might things look like in 2, 5, 10 years?

• What are the ways in which this is positive/we should encourage it (i.e. seeds of a trend that yield more connection, less atomization, more community, potentially helping to resuscitate civil society, etc.) and in what ways should we tread with caution (abdicating agency, leaning in to heavily to hedonistic pulls).

Thanks to Rebecca Lissner for fun discussions on this topic and feedback on this note.