January Blues

Digital migrations and the false online exodus weeks into the new year

I couldn’t bring myself to dive into the usual flood of end-of-year trend reports. By December, my tabs are typically overflowing with beautifully designed decks, each vying to distill the past year and predict the next. Most years, I’d speak on panels about these insights, maybe even drafting my own report. But last year, it all felt like noise—a mess of AI slop and content churned out purely for self-promotion.

January is a strange liminal space, a moment suspended between the overhyped promises of the past and the unfulfilled potential of the future. It carries the illusion of newness before anything tangible has had the chance to shift. For those of us in time zones wrapped in darkness, the brief moments of light—whether streaming from the sun or flickering from a candle—offer quiet reprieve. Yet this light is impeded by another glow: harsh and blue, emanating from screens that feed the relentless churn of our cultural cycles. The 24-hour news cycle has become the 24-second news cycle. Memes and moments move so quickly they adopt and lose meaning in the same breath. It feels like we’re collectively searching for something to grab onto, ready to let go the second something else becomes relevant, hungry to participate in a culture that is fracturing faster than we can keep up.

Source: ReadReceipts (Etsy)

These thoughts lingered as I found myself at Bárd Books, an independent bookshop, for a pub quiz. My team was assembled at random, none of us knew each other, and yet our brains covered categories from music to geography. My contributions revealed themselves in my awareness of the Oxford Dictionary’s last decade of “Words of the Year.” When I listed “Brain Rot” (2024), “Rizz” (2023), and “Goblin Mode” (2022), I was met with blank stares. These terms were meant to represent entire years, yet they pandered to a very online audience that only I was a member of. I wanted to believe that the chronically online were healing, retreating into the analog world with walking clubs and community events. But the past few weeks of digital activity told me otherwise. They’ve shown me there are multiple realities and multiple groups of people who grapple with culture differently. The quiz experience illuminated how some audiences are deeply entrenched in Internet culture while others remain on its periphery, reinforcing cultural fragmentation.

@hopelessed.coreI don’t care 🤷🏻 - - #hopecore #hopelesscore #core #motivation #tiktokban

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Scrolling through my feed last week, the term “TikTok refugee” dominated—a term that left me uneasy. As the child of refugees, in a time of global displacement, I found its casual appropriation troubling and deeply revealing. Screen-recorded videos from another Chinese app, RedBook, flooded my FYP—a digital migration in preparation for a U.S. TikTok ban, that didn’t happen. On the surface, it felt like collective joy, a middle finger to the ban that was later put on pause. But beneath the ha-ha’s, I saw something deeper: the fleeting nature of digital communities and the fragility of culture-bound by content. The relentless speed of Internet culture erodes our ability to derive lasting meaning and connection, it invites chaos and absurdity.

@1bogdanskiiiy1#fyp #foryoupage #losangeles #fire

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In this fragmented, hyper-real cultural climate, everything feels both serious and unserious at once. The scarcity of winter invites introspection, but the relentless churn of digital culture demands participation. 2024 was a fever dream, a year where everything felt both inevitable and impossible. As we step into 2025, I yearn for grounding, a deeper connection that transcends the churn. I don’t want to predict the year; I want to shape it. Shaping, for me, means leaning into slower rhythms, nurturing the communities and connections that feel real, and carving out space (rather than holding it) for meaning amidst the noise. It’s about resisting the pull to constantly consume and instead choosing moments to create, reflect, and be still. Perhaps it means turning away from the fleeting dopamine hits of trends and toward the enduring warmth of what truly matters: presence, depth, and intentionality.