Cultural predictions for 2025: the year we accept the chaos
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Welcome to Life and Art from FT Weekend. I'm Laila Raptopoulos. We have come full circle. Once again, it is the end of the year. We are about to break for the holiday season, and we're honoring an annual tradition. You have tuned in to our prediction episode for 2025. As in previous years, I am here with the editor-at-large of FT Weekend, the great Matt Vela. He is joining me from Copenhagen. Hi, Matt. Welcome. Hi. Hi. Thanks for having me. So good to have you.

So we have asked all our listeners, all of you, as we do every year, to send us your cultural predictions for 2025, both what you think will happen, but also what you want to happen culturally next year. As usual, the responses came flooding in by email and on Instagram. And today we will be playing some of them and chatting through the themes.

Before we start, I have one order of business, which is that this is our last episode of the year, but it's not our final episode of the show. On January 17th, we'll be dropping a big bonus final episode where I wax lyrical about how much I love you all and ask my colleagues all of the excellent questions that you sent in.

But because it is our last episode of the year, I do hope it gets you in the mood to reflect and celebrate and appreciate the fact that we're all still doing the thing, reading and watching and thinking and predicting. And with that, let's get started.

Let's get into it. Matt, hi. Hi. It's my favorite day of the year. Oh, mine too. Mine too. Okay, so why don't we get into predictions? The first thing that we usually do on these shows is look back at whether our predictions from last year came true. And I re-listened to our episode. And I think we did...

Okay. Okay. So big picture, what we predicted was this. We predicted a loud year. You really wanted to coin a term last year, so you coined the term glitter chaos. Yes.

Your take was that we would go from being like worried about a world that didn't totally make sense after the pandemic to embracing the chaos of a world that didn't totally make sense. And we kind of predicted together with listeners that we'd kind of enjoy being chickens with our heads cut off. There would be a lot of whimsy in fashion. There would be dance parties during the workday. There would be crop tops in the office.

What do you think? Do you think that it was a loud year? How do you think we did? I think we might have been a little bit hopeful. Yeah. What do you think? I think so, too. It feels like the wishes of a kind of still post-COVID world

hangover or whatever you want to call it. It didn't feel like a year of revelry and abandon to me. No, there were too many elections. Definitely whimsy happened in fashion. And definitely more men wore like crop tops and short shorts and all of that stuff, which was a delight. Yes. But I think you're right. I don't think we like quite had the fun

We hoped we would. No. What stood out to you about this year when you look back on this year?

I feel like it's something that we actually talked about a few years ago, which is this sort of period we've been living in where the things that aren't supposed to happen keep happening, right? Yeah.

Grenfell Tower, like towers in the middle of London aren't supposed to just catch on fire because of negligence. It's like not supposed to happen. Yeah.

And I feel like most of the first kind of Trump years, a lot of people were sort of waiting for the thing that would set the world back on course. You know, it's going to be the Mueller report and it's going to be impeachment and whatever. You know, those are in political terms. But I feel like maybe we're starting to accept that that isn't going to happen. And even the response in the U.S. to Trump.

The election, I think, kind of indicates there hasn't been this sort of like march on Washington type of response. And I think part of that is that it's a kind of acceptance of chaos. Yeah. I think it's sort of chaos without the glitter, unfortunately. Yeah. You know, the predictions we got this year suggested to me that a lot of listeners, they were like,

Yeah, yeah.

Should we do a couple of fun ones to start and then we can go heavy again? Sorry, sorry. No, I think as we were reading them, we're like, OK, this is a heavy year. Let's pull up the fun ones to the top. I want to start with one that I wholeheartedly endorse. It comes from Maria Petropoulou.

I'd love to see more spontaneous and casual dining in 2025. So my wish and manifestation would be having less of reserving and planning one month ahead for a specific slot and more of like, I'm feeling like dining out tonight, should we go someplace nearby?

Love it. We got a lot of this. We got a lot of like hot takes on dining. A lot of people responded to Maria's original message like, yes, I'm just tired of like waiting in line or getting stuck in the reservation wars. I just want to have a nice regular time at a restaurant and like be spontaneous and not spend a thousand dollars. Yeah, I'm all for it. I think this sort of research over research, over reviewed, over discussed top 10 list

It's tipped past the point of this is a fun thing to care about that defines me to a, this is an oppressive sort of level of ranking and all that stuff on top of just what's supposed to be nice. So I fully embrace this. I don't know how you get to it. I think living in a place that doesn't have a million people.

I can imagine. Do you think Maria is, is she like advocating abolish reservations? Because that I would definitely get behind. Yes. When she first wrote in, she said, I'd love to finally disentangle from the reservation slot nightmare in dining. It's become nearly impossible to casually walk in. Do you want an end to reservations? I don't want an end to reservations.

I want an end to reservations, but I do want more spontaneity. I want people to feel that they can be more spontaneous. But I think that they can do that now. I think we all just have to kind of like get out of the line mentality. Like if there's a three month long line for something, don't think that it's the end all be all. You'll probably go and it'll probably be fine and it'll probably disappoint you a little because you thought it was going to like...

change your life. So it's like, we need to change. Yeah. Can you imagine if the first verse of like scenes from Italian restaurant was him like struggling to like book a place? It's just like, you know, it's like, yeah, you get a bottle of red or a bottle of white. That's where you want to start. A bottle of white, a bottle of red.

Okay, let's do another hopeful one. This comes on the heel of a story I'm sure a lot of listeners have been following, the collapse of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria after 13 years of civil war.

Hi, this is Erin from Tunis. And my cultural prediction for 2025 is that we are going to see an absolute renaissance of Syrian culture in the world writ large. That we are going to see just this incredible blossoming of art and literature and music and film from inside Syria in a way that we haven't been able to for 50 years. And with the fall of the House of Assad,

suddenly there's going to just be all this incredible energy around the really rich history and multicultural world that is Syria. Okay. I hope so. I hope so too. Yeah, I really, really hope so. I'm not saying that in a way like, oh, it's not going to happen. I just, I really hope so too. It's a culture that deserves not to be repressed. No culture does, but it just...

It's a long time coming. There's a big Syrian community here and this has been really every night people have been getting together and partying. And it's just been like one of the few like genuinely good things that's happened. And I hope it stays good. I don't know. What do you think? Yeah, no, I agree. It's also a culture that is like.

Such amazing food and music and artists. And it's like one of the biggest hidden crimes of repression is also that we don't get as much of the culture of these countries. Yeah. We're going to move on to some predictions about media culture. I'm going to start this with our colleague India Ross, their deputy news editor in London. Here we go.

Hello! So my prediction/hope for 2025 is the demise of meme culture. I felt that "Kamala is brat" really was like the beginning of the end of this decade-long trend of every single thing that happens being digested by the internet into this giant inside joke.

The brat thing just felt so bloated and stupid. And of course, ultimately ended in tears that it really made me think about like, where has this gone wrong? Like, where did we lose the thing that was originally great about memes, which was the insidery cachet that like we get this thing that other people don't get.

And I just feel like it's gone too big. And yeah, it's just become boring and I'm ready for something new. Interesting. Yeah. What do you think? I love it as a prediction, but I feel mixed about whether I agree. It's kind of feels provocative partially because we also alongside this, we got a ton of listener predictions about like,

wishes that had to do with Luigi Mangione, the CEO killer, who's like the current meme king, that Luigi will be like the trial of the century and that there will be like a Luigi six-part documentary series. So like, I don't know if meme culture is dead, but there's still something to it. And like, I'm also annoyed by it. Yeah. It's interesting you say that. As I was listening, the first thing that came to my mind was

The clip that went around of the Martha documentary where she was like... Yeah, the Martha Stewart documentary. ...asked if she'd had an affair and she said, no, I just had a fling with a very attractive Irish man, which was like all over my timelines being like same. So that would kind of argue for no, but the Mangione thing is really interesting because...

It peaked so fast. I felt like there was, I don't know, a day and a half or something left.

where it was just the pictures, right? Right. And then it was like the meme consisted not even of information, but just like of the fantasy people had, right? Yes. And the minute you started to get more information, like, well, he's kind of a bro and he's, well, his tweets and like that just like depressed. And then like he couldn't have sex. Yeah, that depressed people. Yeah, yeah, no, exactly. It was like, you don't want the meme

Do you want the pre-meme or the fantasy of the meme, right? It's kind of the inverse of sort of like the 90s thing of like the OJ trial or those kinds of events where it was like, oh, we just want more and more and more and more. It's sort of like at some point feels like when we have too much information, we start to pull back, you know? I mean, for me, it was like...

Oh, his name ends in a vowel. Great. You know, my last name is Vela. And now I was done. I didn't want to read any more. Right. But I feel like everyone had that point of like, oh, I don't want to know about his like weird.

habits or like yeah and it seems like that then it petered out right i mean yeah so maybe the memes won't meme culture won't be over but like meme culture will just get infinitely smaller and it will just get so much shorter that it will almost become dust like a meme cycle will be like 25 minutes okay the next one is also sort of related this is from dan fogarty

Hi, Lila. My name's Dan Fogarty. You asked for predictions for the year, and I think this is the year that social media, and especially Instagram, are just going to completely bleed out. I think Facebook's been dead for years, but I think Instagram's now on the table.

It used to be so much fun, everyone posting pictures of their trips and their meals and their outfits and their houses. Now I don't see any of my friends posting anything anymore. And now it's nothing but brands and advertising. And I think the worst part about it is how they've outright come out and said, you have to post this certain way in a style that kind of mimics TikTok. And I think it's just scared everyone away.

Yeah. What do you think? I feel like a version of this has come up the last couple of years. I don't think that Instagram is going to die, but I do see what he's saying happening. And actually, a friend of the show, Anne Helen Peterson, who's a journalist who was on recently, just wrote about this, too, that like.

People are just posting less. I see my friends and they're looking at stuff and they're responding and everything. But, you know, the last time they posted was like a couple of years ago. And I think you're right that like at this stage, it's kind of started to be framed differently.

in corporate terms or in like virality terms, you see all these people who are sort of like telling a story and they're like, wait for the end or like, like and follow for part two or these things that actually just like try to grab people for engagement. And then as a normal person, like, oh wait, I'm supposed to make a reel of like,

my grandparents being cute in the first three seconds in order to like win but like what am I winning what am I gaining what is like what is it all for anyway I don't know I mean I stopped basically participating in all social media like three years ago as a contributor I still occasionally consume it but um

The thing that I've noticed, which I think there also were some predictions about, is just the amount of slop that's out there and just the garbage. And like human created cultural garbage, I'm fine with. But like I find that like even YouTube and sort of like the old person, quote unquote, social media or whatever, like it's just full of junk. A lot of it is AI stuff.

I find myself being like, why am I keep getting these like videos of what Star Trek would have looked like it was filmed in Panavision in 1960? Like, I'm not interested in any of those things. Why am I getting this? You know, like, I think it's a real problem. I think we're facing a tsunami of shit content, basically. Pardon my French. I think that's right. We got a lot of listeners predicting that too. Like Sophia Masiewicz, she said just more bad AI content.

I mean, the one good thing about that from my perspective is it's just going to make things that are worth spending time with so much more valuable to people. Like TV shows that are not made just so you watch eight hours of it straight. Movies that are made that way, books, journalism, you know. Yeah, totally. I'm saying this because that's the kind of thing that I work on and enjoy the most is the stuff that's like, okay, you're going to stop for an hour or

and it's going to be worth your time. It's going to be worth it. Yeah. Anyone who's going to have a business model, at least in the media business, whether it's journalism or culture, it's going to be because they make stuff that's worth buying and spending time with. I feel that way also with the rise of Substack, even though I follow a lot of newsletters and pay for a lot of newsletters that I really like. The newsletters are very long. They're like

four to six to eight thousand words that are kind of like typos and you realize you're really in a draft form in someone's head and I think like in COVID I really appreciated the draft form like seeing the rough draft sort of and nothing it really felt finished but

But now I am tired of it. I think one of my big predictions for next year is related to this, which is just like, I want to know that the thing that I'm reading, someone thought about, they talked about with an editor, you know, they worked on it, they pushed back and forth, there was tension. And the thing that came out is the final version. It's the thing that like is worth reading because like, you know, it took a lot of time and a lot of smart thought. Did you see Wicked? Yeah.

I saw Wicked. Yeah. So like, this is so corny and makes me sound so old, but I walked out of there and the first thing I said was, that's what movies are for.

And like, it wasn't that I thought it was the greatest thing I've ever seen or anything. Like it was, it was a lot of fun and you know, it was great to be there with people who were love, loved watching it. It's not like I've been humming the music or anything. Even I just was like, man, someone really cared about that. The people who made it really cared about it. And like, even if it's not a hundred percent for me, I just love that.

And I feel like that is God willing that that happens across all kind of like knowledge media. Yeah. Yeah. We want the good stuff. Yeah. OK, this next one is from a friend of mine. It's from JJ in New York. Hey, Lila. My prediction is that after many years of the right really owning the conversation about how men ought to be.

and the left mostly focused on how men should not be, we're going to see a flip where the right is going to be policing one another's maga-ness and the left is going to put forward a positive point of view on what healthy masculinity looks like for people of any identity.

Interesting. What do you think? Well, I don't know what I think yet, but I do know that this came as a response to me just writing like as a prompt on Instagram, like, you know, you could give predictions about music, you get predictions about movies, whatever, but also like what's up with men? Yeah.

Yeah, and I say that kind of tongue-in-cheek, but also like men, real spotlight in 2024. Like really, we just really did want to like figure out what the F happened to men. Please, can we just talk about men for once? God. I know, poor men. Yeah, so I liked this prediction because it was like, it was a real actual thoughtful prediction about like where men go. Yeah, I mean, I saw an absolutely insane New York Times article

head and deck about this the other day, which I'm going to try to find. They had a new term for twink as, you know, only the New York Times can kind of do, where it was like, Timothee Chalamet and, you know, that the sort of like waif man type thing. Yeah, cute boys, little waif-y weirdos. Yeah, it's sort of non-threatening type whatever. But

Noodle Boys. Noodle Boys. Noodle Boy. As an era of macho politics sets in, sinewy stars like Timothee Chalamet, Dominic Sisa, and Mark, I can't pronounce his last name, embody a slinky alternative image of masculinity in American pop culture. Okay. It's interesting because you think about the differences that were sort of in stark contrast during the election, like

I think there is something much more performative and a bit effeminate about men on the right right now in the sense that in the sort of like preening kind of extreme attention to trying to project a masculine image, you kind of go over a certain line. Do you know what I'm talking about? Like sometimes like bodybuilders who are like,

have like insane muscles and all this stuff that kind of begin to look almost like a little girly because it's so worked on. And you just think about Don Jr.'s beard and some of these people who've like,

preened, you know? Yes. I know maybe I'm associating these things with gender and that's problematic. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. No, I understand what you're saying. You know, I've been watching the Internet react to these rumors that J.D. Vance, our VP to be, has had all this plastic surgery and presumably is doing it to like reach some certain ideal of masculinity. But in the end, it just kind of makes him look

pretty, which is funny. But I feel like what the caller is saying is a little different, which is that like the left will give us a definition of good masculinity versus just shaming men for like, I don't know, liking Louis C.K. Like we got a little bit of that with Tim Walls, Kamala's vice president pick. Like there was a sense of like a real man should care about his kids or like a real man can coach football and run the Gay Straight Alliance.

and that we should give men a chance to be good. What do you think? I think if that's a prediction, I'm just going to say, I think we're going to get a lot more evidence that men are bad. Men do bad things. And it doesn't matter whether liberal or conservative or whatever. But, you know, I don't know. I don't think the sort of like evidence is going to be very good. Yeah. All right. Well, I'll take the hopeful view on that one. You can take the cynical one. Okay. Okay.

So we got a lot of great responses. I won't be able to mention all of them, but there's one that I loved by Anna Nicolaou, our U.S. media editor. She says that Lena Dunham will be cool again. And I'm into this one because I think we kind of did her dirty as a culture. I like stand by that. I feel like she's very smart. And her only crime was that she didn't act media trained and she said what she thought and people found her kind of annoying. Yeah.

And that is not an actual crime to be annoying. And it is something that we should tolerate from women. And yeah, Lena Dunham, cool again, 2025. I mean, I think Lena Dunham was always cool, like whether she annoyed you or not. And she actually, it was interesting. She wrote recently something for the magazine about Sally Rooney. Yes, that's excellent. And there was a bit,

I mean, you know, I may be reading into it, but there was a bit that felt like almost like a bit of a lamentation. Like if I had come along at a slightly different era, would I have gotten, you know, kind of drowned out in the same way? Or would I have found my niche? That's interesting. Yeah. I mean, she and Sally Rooney were both kind of like deemed the voice of a generation when they were young in their careers. Yeah.

Do you think that it was sort of harder for Lena Dunham to sustain that because of when she came up? I think if you're talking about the sort of era that Girls was on, that was kind of the end of the mass audience, right? Yes. Like where the culture was saying, oh, we're all obsessed with this person. And if...

part of the mass really didn't like them or didn't think that they deserve the sort of celebrity or whatever people's problems with her were, then it's much more vitriolic than someone who comes after 2011. And then it's much more about tribes and I have my fans and they will say, I'm the voice of a generation within the fandom, you know? Right. And, and,

So, like, I mean, there are fewer and fewer cultural figures who kind of span all audiences. This is something that's kind of happened, right? Like, we've all kind of splintered off into our own little Patreon bubbles or whatever. And there are fewer, I mean, you know, there are fewer and fewer kind of mass figures or events, you know? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Okay, Matt, so as we're coming to a close and we've gone through our listener predictions and we've talked about how we have thought about where things might be going, I kind of want to return to this question of, like, big picture, what do we think...

the vibe is going to be next year. In 2022, on our predictions episode, our listeners were predicting the return of the flip phone and the return of the milkman. Like they really wanted like a pre-agrarian society. You know, I think about that milkman every so often. And in fact, we were working on a story the other day, which began with a milkman making delivery, noticing that a building was on fire. And I thought of that person and I couldn't,

Estonia. In Romania. Romania, yeah. He actually came to New York and we had a coffee together. Oh, that's great. Yeah, that's great. So it went from that to in sort of 2023, listeners were predicting a year of like, fuck it, party chaos. And now in 2024, we're seeing listeners like looking at the future and just being like, ugh.

And predicting wholesale like Instagram is going to be over. Blue Sky is not going to work. Like we can't get into restaurants anymore. Like memes are dead. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, I'm curious what you think. Like my prediction is that 2025 is maybe the year that we all just kind of like accept reality. Yeah. Yeah.

I don't lean this way generally, but I recently learned that Pluto is back in Aquarius after 226 years. Okay. And when I fell down a rabbit hole about what that means from a sort of astrological point of view, it's like chaos era vibes. Like the last time I think...

was during the French Revolution. So like institutions crumble, that kind of thing. And you know, all right, how much stock do you put in that kind of thing? But then I read that it's going from now until 2043.

And so, you know, it's a long time. But I had this moment of like kind of Zen where I was like, oh, yeah, things are going to be weird for a long time. So just stop being upset that they're weird. Yeah. Just buckle in and get your joy wherever you can. I think that's right. I think like...

in some ways, like stop resisting it. Like I read this piece in the New York Times by this journalist, Michael Grunwald, and it basically was about how, did you read it? It was like about how the future of farming and agriculture like shouldn't actually be this like soft, gentle, regenerative agriculture where we like don't use pesticides and like

hug our cows or whatever. If we want to feed everybody, we need the thing that everybody thinks is evil, which is factory farming. Yeah, I did see this. Yeah. It was like a pro factory farming piece. But really what he was saying is like, you know, like we have this cultural nostalgia for this quaint farmstead of the past and this like red barn and these like rolling hills and like a farmer clapping his son on

Yeah, it doesn't exist. It doesn't really exist. Right. And it hasn't for a long time. And actually, those like made more of a mess to the environment than factory farming does. We just have to like make factory farming better. And it's just like a less romantic truth. Yeah.

And I just I've been feeling that in everything. And it's sort of encapsulated my prediction, which is basically like it feels as a culture that we're like nostalgic. And myself, too, for this like good old days where we had community and no phones and could like go outside and milk a cow. And, you know, or like the more recent good old days were like Facebook was big or Tumblr or like when we had Twitter, like even more recently and everything.

But like the past, you know, it also smelled like shit and everyone died of dysentery or like also Twitter was mean. Yeah. Well, we're going to get to experience the past when they get rid of the polio vaccine and whatever else they do. So it's going to come back. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's really interesting. I mean, I don't know about that factory farming thing specifically, but like. Yeah, I don't either. You know, management and administration, competent management and like when things work.

and are invested in it's nice you know you know what i mean you know when you go to an import in a country that's invested in infrastructure versus one that isn't and it seems like a lot of the west has like decided we're not going to invest in our infrastructure whether it's literal infrastructure or kind of social infrastructure and it's going to get old very soon you know but but

And then maybe a reaction to that becomes like, maybe because infrastructure doesn't work. You go on TikTok and you see like a trad wife say like, my husband wanted brownies. So I went outside and lit a fire and like roasted a bunch of cocoa beans. And you're like...

What? It's okay. Buy the chocolate. It's okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So what is it? Like, it's not a very hopeful prediction to say, you know, 2025 is the year of like, accept reality, we'll be fine. Whatever comes, we'll be able to deal with it because we have no choice. You know, like...

It's OK if you don't know about factory farming. You don't have to fight factory farming advancements. It's OK if you use AI as a thesaurus. It doesn't mean that like AI will take over human thought. But then at the same time, like it's not OK that health insurance works the way it does. And it's not OK that like environmentalism is.

you know, that there are fires. Yeah. I mean, okay. Just to put my like rose colored glasses on. Yeah, do it. My FT pink colored glasses on. Sure. The positive spin on that is if we no longer feel like we have to hold the correct position or say the right thing, because we're doing it in a hyper sort of communicative environment where everyone is going to see and judge us.

Doesn't that kind of mean you're free to just say things because you care about them and do things because you believe in them? Like, I mean, I guess what I'm saying is a very obvious version of like, don't talk about it, be about it. But... Yeah, yeah, yeah. It feels like we're kind of in that era of just like, everyone's getting so tired of editing what they're saying and thinking about who's consuming it and who's seeing it and how they're coming off and their brand and all that shit that you just...

just do the things you care about, you know? Yeah. I think that's a perfect prediction. Just like focus on the things you know about and you care about and you want to, and like, don't worry about being watched. You don't have to be watched unless you want to be. And just go to your local restaurant. Have a nice time. Yeah. Matt, what a joy.

Thank you so much. Is it four or three? Three years. My longest relationship. No, just kidding. Just kidding. This has been one of my favorite things to do every year. And I'm going to miss it. And thank you. Me too.

That's the show. Thank you for listening to Life and Art from FT Weekend. I've put a couple of relevant links for things that Matt and I discussed in the show notes and also a link to all of your predictions, which I saved on my Instagram. They're all excellent if you want to keep reading them. Also, I have linked to a final discount to a subscription to the Financial Times.

We will be back on January 17th for one last hurrah, where we will answer all the cultural questions you've been sending in. If you still got one, we still have time. You can send it to me by email at lilarap at ft.com. That's L-I-L-A-H-R-A-P. I'm also on Instagram at lilarap. If you want to keep following my work, that's a good place to follow me. I'm Lila Raptopoulos.

And here's our wonderful team. Katya Kamkova is our senior producer and produced this episode. Lulu Smith is our producer. Our sound engineers are Joe Salcedo, Sam Jovinko, and the great Breen Turner with original music by Metaphor Music. We had help this week from Katie McMurrin. Topher Forges is our executive producer. And our global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley.

We are so thankful we got to spend this year with you. Have an excellent Christmas and Hanukkah if you celebrate, and all of the holidays. Enjoy them all. New Year. And we'll find each other again for the last time on January 17th.

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