Trends we’re keeping and leaving in 2025
It’s getting harder to differentiate one year from the other. This may be a side effect of growing older and not defining my life in grade levels, or—what seems likelier—that my sense of time is increasingly warped by constant scrolling, every single day of every single year.
How strange to have a habit so pervasive yet so meaningless, that I forget what I was so frenziedly consuming mere hours after the fact.
From run clubs to being nonchalant, what’s in and out this coming year?
The internet’s infinite scroll is also where today’s trends are mainly born then hacked to death, proving relevant the cultural observation that social media is not just a repository or virtual translation of our lives, but our lives, period. This list is essentially what I consider in and out for 2025, and it is, of course, not exhaustive or to be taken 100-percent seriously. Think of it as New Year’s resolutions by way of trend report; an attempt to live a life we actually like, amid being served trends hyper-optimized to fit what algorithms think we like.
WHAT’S IN
Physical media
I’m not just saying this because I work for a newspaper! I genuinely believe the resurgence of vinyl records and the uptick in people reading physical books signify a positive change. I like to think holding something physical produces the same effects as “touching grass,” an internet idiom about disconnecting and getting back in touch with the real world. It takes our eyes off of screens and makes us more mindful of what we spend our attention on. As algorithms become more evil and AI becomes more inescapable—why create an AI DJ when the world already has too many?—physical media are a respite from constantly being tracked and analyzed as a data point.
Besides, contrary to what we were told, nothing on the internet lasts forever. Links to my favorite 2010s blogs are dead. Movies I want to rewatch are nowhere on my five streaming platforms. Now if only there were a way to own them for myself…
Clubs, from run clubs to craft clubs
2024 was the year of the hobby, and thank God: I’m beginning to sound like a boomer, but spending so much time on our phones atrophies not just our attention spans but also our personalities. How can I talk to people when the only thing I have going for myself is being very online?
I found unexpected joy in working with my hands this year, from creating friendship bracelets for Taylor Swift’s “Eras” tour to hand-making zines for a stint at the annual zine fair Better Living Through Xeroxography (BLTX). I met with friends for the sole purpose of stringing together such bracelets, and it gave me such a high that I didn’t stop making them even after my concert stop was over. Not even to sell them, but for pure love of the game.
It’s also frankly a relief that, after years of being incentivized to isolate, we have figured out how to be part of a community. In 2025, join a run club, invite friends to “junk journal,” or start a book club.
Supporting (hyper)local
In July, for The Philippine STAR’s anniversary issue, Pangasinan's 4th District Representative Christopher de Venecia wrote a guest column arguing that the country’s creative sector is its greatest hidden strength. He is the principal author of the Philippine Creative Industries Development Act, and in the column, he asserted that hyper-local is the new global.
This means finding creatives wherever you’re from and supporting that creativity, and in the process, unlearning the tendency that artists must be in Manila to thrive (or inversely, that only artists from Manila are good). I had the opportunity to visit Dagupan in late 2023 to meet the artists of the Anakbanwa Creative Residency, which de Venecia co-founded, and I was in awe of how fully realized their homegrown talents were—the outcome of giving young artists spaces to explore and learn, right where they are.
In Cavite, where I’m from, I discovered a lively poetry community hidden in homey cafes. Verlin Santos, founder of Cavite-based collective Titik Poetry, told me he only started holding events here because he was tired of commuting to Manila to perform spoken poetry. Just a few months ago, the independent music publication Coast2Coast was launched, dedicated to the music scenes of Visayas and Mindanao. These creatives exist, waiting to be found. And how humdrum would it be, if all the artists we liked drew from identical experiences?
Honorable mentions for what’s in: Listening to albums in full, being very offline, enduring things that are difficult to understand, discovering things via Google Maps, and intentionally ugly fashion.
WHAT’S OUT
Brain rot
At first the absurd, nonsensical meme lexicon of Gen Z and Gen Alpha was funny, even subversive. Then I hear someone say “Skibidi toilet” in person, in real life, and instantly feel five years get shaved off my lifespan. “Brain rot” being Oxford Dictionary’s Word of the Year should be ample cause to ring the alarms. A deteriorating mental state, mainly due to overconsumption of low-quality online content, should never be the defining characteristic of any year.
It's uncomfortably close to anti-intellectualism, which makes us more vulnerable to propaganda and disinformation. I know it’s not meant to be that serious—brain rot is just jokes, etc.—but when it bleeds into what we actually say, and it becomes something we spend considerable time consuming, it’s hard not to think our brains are actually rotting right in our skulls.
Nonchalance
Exhaustion to the point of apathy is often our default, and it’s not so much a character flaw but simply an inevitable response to the state of the world. But I like to remember that being human, at its very fundamental, is about caring. It’s what sets us apart from other species.
Indifference being widespread means earnestness and burning passion have become rare feelings that should be treasured and experienced all the way through. I like to think it’s lucky to be jolted awake from eternal, nonchalant slumber by strong emotions, regardless of whether these emotions sometimes hurt. It just means you have cared so, so much, and how great to be reminded of this ability. Next year, let’s linger on our feelings a little longer.
Saying “I’m just a girl!”
The fact that young girls can now take pride in being a girl is a step in the right direction, and, to draw from another trending buzzword this year, it’s healing my inner child. But iterations of “I’m just a girl,” from 2023’s “girl math” to the rise of “trad wives,” “princess treatment,” and tapping into one’s “feminine energy” all point us towards a specific kind of womanhood—one that, in the long run, is more docile and ready to be subjugated.
“I’m just a girl” starts as a joke, that’s true, yet it’s worrying that it can lead some women to say they hate feminism because they used to not have to work, or that they’d prefer if a man just provided for them. I get we’re all tired, but wishing to revoke our rights, even jokingly, is actually kind of insane. And it’s not like the undoing of these rights is not happening in real life: In the US, Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court ruling that recognized abortion as a constitutional right for the past half a century, was recently overturned. In the Philippines, we never even came close.
Honorable mentions for what’s out: Hating small talk, posting “hot takes” about issues that just came out, using therapy-speak for everyday situations, microlabels, getting news from social media, and situationships.
