What will the future be like? Will 2025 be better than 2024? Will it be worse? Cooler, both figuratively and maybe also literally, because we’re due for a dip in temperatures one of these years, right? Or hotter, because that’s inescapable?
What will people be eating, wearing, reading, watching, and thinking in 2025? Will they still go to the same restaurants and order the same dishes, because they didn’t actually get to the trendy places in 2024 and so still need to catch up, as it were, on last year’s—this year’s?—trends? Will the restaurants be dark or bright, loud or, as our hearing fades with age, mercifully muted? Will we ogle the wallpaper from a heritage Welsh company that nearly went out of business during the pandemic, or will we admire the homespun bric-à-brac that makes us feel like we’re in someone else’s apartment? Will the ingredients themselves be special? Carrots—carrots haven’t “had a moment” in several years, have they?—from an overlooked farm in the Catskills? Will those same farmers have finally mastered the breeding of “geeps,” goat-sheep hybrids whose milk makes for cheeses no one on earth has heretofore tasted? (Will the cheese be indistinguishable from Whole Foods feta?) Will the chefs, who all now eschew tats and staches, seek out an affordable new cut of beef, find it, promote it, and make it instantly unaffordable at the butcher shop?
Will we start drinking sherry, as we’ve been told we would twice a year since the discovery of Spain in 2014? Or was it vermouth? Or cognac and/or armagnac? Can we not remember because we drank too much whiskey?
Which coffee wave will 2025 bring? Can we count that high? Are we in the realm of complex numbers? Does coffee even grow in 2025? Are we all going to have to drink tea?
Will 2025 be all about the pants? Will 2025 be all about the ruching? Will 2025 be all about the details? Will 2025 be all about the darts? The codpiece? The saddle stitch? What is bold maximalism? Moto boho? If everything in 2025 is cherry coded, will we be able to decipher it? Will quiet luxury do an Irish goodbye? Will 2025 be all about 1985? 1885? 85 BCE? Will the dimming light of a dying star cast new silhouettes in 2025? Will there be a new Chinese app to order new Chinese clothes from a new generation of Chinese child laborers? Will there be a China in 2025?
Where will we go in 2025? Will it be to a country that had been torn apart by war or natural disaster and is now on the mend but still needs our tourism dollars? Will it be an old favorite city we’ve simply been overlooking for long enough that now—in 2025—it seems new again? Will it be the place we actually visited last year, and now we don’t even need to go but can bask in the glow of having seen the anointed spot before the rest of you losers? Is 2025 a beach year, a mountain year, an urban year? Will there be a new airline? Will there be new luggage? Will the new airline lose the new luggage? Will our passport be renewed in time? Will we miss the flight? Did we want to go in the first place? Will we fight with our family members and/or lover on the flight? Will there be a new lover? A new family? A new codpiece? Where are we? Where are we going, and why did we want to go there in the first place? What if I opened the airplane door in mid-flight? What if I didn’t? What if I learned a new language and never went home? What if I learned a new language and never left home? Where did I even go in 2024? Where did 2024 go?
More after the jump…?
Will There Be a 2025?
Will we all, a week hence, stride right up to the line dividing year from year and collectively shrug out a “nah”? Will the promise of the future fail us? Will we decide we’ve had it pretty good in 2024 and hit pause? Were the present and its recent past so bad after all? Was this year not, perhaps, the height of human achievement, a pinnacle from which the descent will be steep and unstoppable? Should we not now stand athwart the future and yell stop?
Do we need the future anymore? Do we need the next Dune movie, the next Trump presidency, the next iPhone? Do we need to find out what happens on Severance or on Real Housewives of 2025? Do we need to watch the temperature tick up and up and up, along with housing prices and sea levels and blood pressure? Do we need to witness the next scene, let alone the next act? Can the narrative so far ever be enough for us? Or do we so imagine ourselves as essential elements of the story that we simply must find out what happens next, even if what happens next is by turns horrible, disappointing, and, worst of all, boring? Can’t we just predict that all, because surely it will only be a variation of what we’ve already experienced, with uninventive twists and new bit players whose presence begins to grate as soon as their sheen of novelty fades, likely around mid-March? Can’t we just ask ChatGPT and be done with it? How can we shut this thing down?
What is a trend, anyway? Is it an observation, obvious in retrospect, or a prescient and insightful commentary on the unseen forces that shape our lives? Is it an acknowledgment that control over our futures is always in someone else’s hands, whether it’s the imagination of the trendcaster or the denizens of the C-suite? Or is it something in the air? Why do we need to identify the trends, anyway? Do we seriously lack the imagination to choose for ourselves what to eat and what to wear and where to go? Do we want to pretend we possess some insider knowledge, shared with millions, of how things will go? Did that make us feel better last year? Did it ever? Is it okay to feel better about things over which we have no influence? Should we feel worse about it? Are we allowed no illusions in 2025? Should we feel anything at all? Was it sherry or vermouth we were supposed to start drinking in 2024?
Or is this merely the fear speaking? Do we reject the march of time and the easy pleasures of trend reports because we are, despite our ironic pose, terrified of not knowing what will come to pass? Do we sneer at the trendspotters out of jealousy, for they have the impostor’s confidence to embrace the new year in all its flimsy newness, while we foresee only darkness and failure? Can we not find some solace in at least one of the 52 places? Can we not appreciate the geniuses giving us trend identities such as moto boho, sea witchery, and pickle fix? Should we be bothered that these trends are untethered from any reality the rest of us inhabit? Or should we find inspiration in the invention, in the year-after-year commitment to the bit by legions of journalists and commentators? Is this piece you are reading not itself inspired by their work? Can we not just get over ourselves and watch others shovel cultural snow while we sip hot cocoa?
Will there be an overarching trend for 2025? Will it be resilience, resistance, revolution? Or will it be a rehash? Wait, what was 2024 about? Was there a trend? Did we know what was happening, what we were doing, how things would go? Does anyone remember where we were exactly a year ago, on the precipice of 2024 and devouring the soothsayers’ stories of what to expect in the next twelvemonth? What were our hopes? To drink sherry? What are they now? To drink vermouth?
What would Sisyphus do? Would he, facing the dawn of another year in an infinite string of years without change, write headlines in his head? Best boulders for 2025? Top underworld mountains of 2025? 52 subtle moments of existential triumph for 2025? If we must imagine Sisyphus happy, can we also imagine him imagining himself happy in the new year, and ourselves as well? 🪨🪨🪨
It’s Good and I Like It: Land O Lakes Chocolate Supreme Cocoa Mix
It’s winter, so you should be drinking hot chocolate at least once a day, and rather than going the Swiss Miss route or getting fancy with Ghirardelli, you should try this one, from Land O Lakes of all places. It’s chocolate-y, not too sweet, and full of body. Get 36 single-serve packets all at once, so you don’t run out.
