#online-culture

#online-culture

2025's words of the year reflect a generation frustrated with job prospects, AI, and online culture. Platforms have chosen terms like "fatigue," "AI slop," and "rage bait." For the first time, Dictionary.com chose a word that is also a number as its Word of the Year. Everyone is over 2025. Various platforms and dictionaries released their word of the year in December, and the choices widely reflect a sense of inescapable uncertainty, exhaustion, and skepticism of the tech world.

TLDR: The online world amplifies a deep human paradox: we want to fit in and stand out at the same time. Algorithms reward polish, not practice. Visibility, not depth. The antidote is in reclaiming the messy middle where originality is formed, and letting technology be collaborators, not replacements. I keep circling a question that psychology hasn't yet neatly answered: why does the online world make us feel both too different to belong and too ordinary to matter?

The online world amplifies a deep human paradox: we want to fit in and stand out at the same time. Algorithms reward polish, not practice. Visibility, not depth. The antidote is in reclaiming the messy middle where originality is formed, and letting technology be collaborators, not replacements. I keep circling a question that psychology hasn't yet neatly answered: why does the online world make us feel both too different to belong and too ordinary to matter? Every one of use

This could have been useful to Extremely Online People like the alleged shooter, who was turned in by some of his own family members and who might have been dissuaded from his actions had he engaged more directly with them. (Of course, simplistic advice like this is often wrong; difficult family members and broken relationships might mean that in-person connection is also unhelpful for some.)

The modern internet is a hostile environment full of spies, miscreants and narcs, prompting savvy users to protect themselves with coded language.