What's In and What's Out in 2025
Not a comprehensive list
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The gig economy is brutal. In addition to my ever expanding list of jobs, which already includes “writer” and “horse psychic,” I’ve taken up work as a freelance oracle. Yes, it’s time for my much anticipated “what’s in and what’s out” list for 2025, a year arriving to us after 365 days of “mostly punishment.” When time isn’t healing all wounds, it’s creating new ones with hammers, baseball bats, and slingshots.
Well, it wasn’t all bad, was it? If you happen to literally be the color green (Green, if you’re reading this, I’m a big fan), 2024 was about as good as it gets, between Brat Summer and Wicked Winter. For me, 2024 will always be the year Madame Web came out, a film that permanently rearranged my brain chemistry, granting me the ability to astral project and peer into neighboring universes.
On that note, I’ve utilized my unique skill set to commune with the spirits, the algorithms, the beauty bloggers, the interior decorators, friends I consider “trendy,” random men on Grindr, and, most importantly, my personal biases to bring you this list, a mix of analysis, opinion, and good old gut feeling. I’ll be skipping “oligarchy” and “stochastic terrorism.” We know those are in.
Alright, let’s get going. Prophetic visions are not necessarily endorsements.
IN: Caves
Trend forecasts tend to operate on binaries, like minimalism vs. maximalism. Here’s another: outside vs. inside. Something that kept coming up in my contemplation of 2025 is this idea of caves. Not actual caves. Actual caves are always, by definition, “in.” I mean emotional caves. Psychological caves. Cultural silos. Closed-off spaces that are easier to customize and gate-keep. Places to retreat into and lick wounds.
The “caves” theme crops up a lot in this list, for better and for worse. The cave, the womb, can be a place of warmth and comfort, but also of coldness and isolation. I see detachment, mistrust of the outside world, and a preference for the familiar over an appetite for the exotic in our collective future. Just don’t go spelunking. That is not where your body is supposed to be.
OUT: Social Media
Frequently derided for its echo chambers, the project of social media is nonetheless in many ways the opposite of a cave — a sweeping savannah home to a wide diversity of groups, which, even if they mostly stick together, do interact with one another, sometimes to bloody results. The danger is part of what makes it fun. You never know if today will be the day you get pounced on by a lion, or ratio’d by a Swiftie.
But social media is undeniably in its flop era. It’s a fractured mess, and its fracturing is calling into question what social media is really for. Is it for generating productive discussion? Is it for exposing yourself to different viewpoints? Is it for posting pictures of your lunch? Is it just a drug? Was the whole thing a mistake?
It could be that exposing our thoughts to millions of total strangers isn’t something our brains are equipped to handle yet. Either way, smaller, more intentional internet communities and personal websites might see renewed interest as the digital hive mind continues its descent into disorganized madness.
IN: Aliens
I swear I had this written down before the “drone panic” stuff in New Jersey, a mass hysteria event that, for my personal benefit, should have begun on January 1st. But whatever. I’ll say what I was going to say anyway, which is that anxiety, that nebulous sense of fear and dread, always seeks a form, a shape, or a face. This is so that we can at least pretend to understand it. This anxiety will often seek out “the other” as its avatar, a foreign body from a different world that seeks to do us harm. You know. Like aliens.
Space. The stars. Cosmic horror. UFOs. Suspicions about the sky. I see 2025 as a big year for aliens, drones, telescopes, and bespectacled eccentrics with conspiracy theories.
OUT: True Crime
Look, this isn’t about any moral judgment on my end. I consume the content myself. I just think “true crime,” in terms of how we think about the genre right now, is too bloated to continue on this way. The space is incredibly crowded. It’s been suffocated, and not in the way that true crime fans like, where the killer gets away with it and still needs to be identified with the assistance of Reddit. I can identify the killer. It’s over-saturation.
It seems like everyone with a fancy microphone and a dream of being an internet influencer is giving true crime a shot. It’s the same six or so cases on a loop, many of which already have a definitive text. (side note: I enjoy LEMMiNO’s YouTube channel, which scratches the true crime itch and focuses more on mysteries than recent unsolved murders). Maybe we shouldn’t be building internet brands off of recent unsolved murders anyway. Sorry, that’s a moral judgment. I lied. Take me to court and make a mid YouTube video about it. Sponsored by RAID: Shadow Legends.
IN: Medieval Peasant Mindset
Gut instinct. Susceptibility to mass hysteria. Torches and pitchforks. Making songs about folk heroes. Let’s get some lutes and some tunics in this bitch and have ourselves another dancing plague. Shall we burn some heretics at the stake later? Fuck it, having a widow’s peak is a bad omen. Certain nose shapes do make you more likely to be an adulterer. Make sure your four humors are properly balanced, diva, because thinking like a medieval peasant is back in style. Only, this time, we have TikTok. Yay.
OUT: Legacy Media
I’m something of a legacy media fan. Landing a byline at a new outlet used to feel so exciting. My coastal elite is showing, but truly, nothing hits like reading a long, immaculately crafted essay in the New Yorker, or a salacious personal essay in The Cut. And, for sure, there are still outlets like those that are doing the damn thing. But shifting economic and cultural tides have really done a number on the old media ecosystem, and many of its storied institutions have borne the brunt. It’s long been the case that these places have been owned by the mega rich, but only recently did those mega rich people align themselves so publicly with power.
So too have people always accused these outlets of being biased, but one of their main selling points was the idea that they weren’t, that they were being run by professionals who would provide robust fact-checking and strong edits. But many of those editors and fact-checkers have been fired, as have several of the reporters who did the less glamorous work of covering local stories. Legacy media has opted instead for the “star writer” system, where a very select few writers with huge followings (often opinion columnists) make all the money. But, at that point, why not go with alternative media, or pay individual writers independently? It’s a shame, because we’re going to need meticulous reporting in the years to come, but the click economy, and the billionaire owner model, aren’t conducive to it.
IN: Physical Media
Girl, they’re deleting your favorite TV show from the internet entirely. Like, they are Thanos snapping it out of existence. You should probably burn it to a CD or something. Do people still do box sets? I think box sets are nice. They’re handsome and stately. I like looking at them in people’s homes. We should do more box sets. That’s how I feel. That’s how I feel.
OUT: ‘Smart’ Movies
Okay, hear me out. Over the past several years, we’ve seen the rise of the “smart movie.” I guess I would define them as movies that make you feel smart for watching them. These are movies with an almost essayish point to make, and they use genre as a vehicle to make it. This infiltration of genre is part of the viewing pleasure, what makes it “smart,” because it’s clever: You thought you were watching a simple horror movie, but you actually got a profound meditation on race, class, or gender.
I like a lot of these movies. Some are more successful than others, and the successful ones inspired many sons. The gold standard was set long ago with films like Get Out and Parasite. There were some lesser ones, including the likes of The Menu and Promising Young Woman, in my opinion. But whatever you think of these flicks, one thing that unites them is that they stick it to genre. Genre is sort of the Trojan horse, the crude vessel in which something more substantial is hiding. I think that was an interesting idea for a time, but I would like to see a return to a more earnest embrace of the delights and thrills of genre.
Movies having something relevant to say about the era in which they’re made is nothing new, of course, but I kind of miss having to work to figure out what that “something” is. It seems like the lesson people took from Get Out and Parasite is that an intelligent movie is one with something important to say about the real world, that it says it pretty obviously, and the fact that the movie is saying it makes watching it something akin to “doing the work.” But lately, it feels like the movie is trying to “do the work” for me, and one thing I love about cinema is coming to my own conclusions. Plus, I think genre can be good on its own, actually. Maybe genre can be good. Maybe genre is there for a reason.
IN: Chandeliers
If you’re a weird guy living in the rafters of your local theater with a passion for antagonizing thespians, rejoice: chandeliers are in! I don’t mean those contemporary light fixtures that come in weird shapes. I’m talking about good old fashioned, crystal chandeliers. Why did we stop doing those? I guess at some point they came to be associated with tacky excess, or grandma’s house. But I think we should go back to doing ornate chandeliers. I think they’re nice.
OUT: Shared Plates
The concept is lovely, but I’m getting fatigued with the politics involved with scooping the precisely acceptable amount of rigatoni onto my plate. Best case scenario, I eat something really good, and find myself wishing I had more of it. But I don’t, because this little dish is meant for six people. Maybe we should all order our own dinners and get the “sharing is caring” out of our system with the appetizer.
IN: House Parties
What if I told you that you can socialize with your friends and also be in bed at a reasonable hour? Or that there was a kind of party you can attend where you can actually hear what the person in front of you is saying? Yes, the house party is back in full swing. There’s often even a couch you can sit on. If you’re really lucky, there’s a dog. House parties are great. I think we should do them more often. I think we should all get into the idea of “entertaining.” We should be purchasing decor and looking up recipes with the explicit goal of “entertaining.” We should be looking at expensive mahogany tables with our boyfriends and wistfully saying, “this would be perfect for when we entertain, don’t you think?” I should get an expensive table. I should get a boyfriend. I should get a house.
OUT: Ticketed Parties
I turned against the idea of ticketed parties when a friend of mine told me he was heading out to “Wrecked and Carry Nation” and I was offended that he would make something up like that, that he would just throw four words together and toss them at me and expect me to accept them. Wrecked and Carry Nation is not real. It is not recognized by the UN. I can acknowledge Horse Meat Disco, but I have my limits.
Contrary to everything I just said, I enjoy the occasional ticketed, sweaty dance party, but I don’t love how expensive they’ve gotten, and my poor eardrums can only take so much punishment.
IN: Personal Training
One of the vanishingly rare avenues where science and precision are actually trending instead of declining is “personal fitness.” People seem less willing to wing it in the gym, and that’s probably for the best. You can hurt yourself, or waste your time. Personal training has historically been thought of as too expensive, but that’s changing. In my experience, it’s worth it to have someone teaching you proper form and keeping you on track with your goals. I think personal training will continue to get more common and accessible. There are burgeoning apps like Adonis that connect users to trainers in their area and within their price range, and it’s indicative of the growing appetite for a customized fitness experience over joining a pricy gym and wandering around the weight room while on your phone. That does count as cardio, though. Get your steps in.
OUT: Barry’s Bootcamp
If you want to pay $40 to have a gay man yell at you through a Britney mic while you engage in psychic warfare with the two people on neighboring treadmills in a dimly lit room, however, Barry’s Bootcamp remains just about the highest tier workout experience on offer and it’s not even close.
IN: Setting Each Other Up
Enough. I’m single. You’re aware of it. You have cute single friends. Gimme. Don’t be greedy. Just do it. You know who I think you’d like? You know who you should meet? Yes, it’s time to deputize our friends to work as matchmakers. Maybe it’s not even romantic. Maybe it’s just setting friends up with friends for a friend date because you think they’d be friends. We should make that more common. It doesn’t have to be elaborate or subtle. We should brazenly be saying, “there’s someone you should know.” At this point, what have we got to lose?
OUT: Dating apps
Am I deleting Grindr or Hinge? No. Those are my emotional support dating apps. But it must be said that there are simply too many dating apps, and many of them are declining in quality. Grindr, specifically, is a buggy mess these days. Don’t even get me started on Raya. I don’t know what Raya is for. It’s like a worse, less horny LinkedIn. Pare your dating apps down to, like, one or two maximum, and make room for other apps, like the Merlin Bird ID app, that helps you identify birds. I would rather identify a bird than engage with “Kyle.” Identifying birds is in. Kyle is out.
Thank you.
You know what’s always “in?” Supporting writers and artists you like! You can do so by clicking the link below. It’s so appreciated, and I can’t wait to see what 2025 has in store for you and me.
JP
picturing a chandelier in a cave, what a beautiful image you have conjured
"Make sure your four humors are properly balanced, diva!" And when a woman in a beige apartment gets 400k tiktok followers from saying exactly this, what then?