Rage Bait

December is the month when all of the year-end lists come out including "Google Year in Review," Best songs of the year, Best movies of the year, Time's Person of the Year (last year it was Taylor Swift, not sure how they can top that), but one category I've become more interested in over the years is the Oxford Dictionary Word of the Year, as it reflects the current zeitgeist and trends of our times. 2021 was especially appropriate with the term "vax" standing for all the Covid vaccinations everyone did throughout the year, and I really look back to 2021 as the beginning of the end of Covid. Since that generally positive word of the year, though, the words have generally trended in a downward direction, with 2022 being "goblin mode," which surprisingly didn't catch on as a way to say giving up social norms and just acting sloppy, lazy, self-indulgent (I know a few people who went goblin mode for sure, including myself to a degree who stopped wearing adult clothing and just lounges around at home in casual wear every day), 2023 was "rizz" which in itself is not negative but just makes me the word-snob cringe about how we're making words out of shortened forms of better words, "rizz" being from charisma. Charisma is actually a very well-reasoned word, with ancient Greek roots, and rolls off the tongue. Why don't we just bring the word "charisma" back into popular usage instead of coining a nonsense term that means the same thing but just gives certain people the chance to sound cool and hip to the new lingo? "Rizz" reminds me of middle school and high school when everyone was desperately trying to fit in and be part of the cool crowd or at least sound like the cool crowd by knowing things that other people didn't, even if it was nonsense words or inane gossip. Because you knew it and others didn't, somehow that made you more desirable or popular. It was a rat race that I never signed up for but I see even more in adult society (High school never ends!) And sadly rizz has stuck, it's part of the culture now, just like "6-7" did, which I'm frankly surprised isn't the word of the year for 2025. The word for 2024 was "brain-rot" which actually is an effective description of what's happening to society, so I support the invention of this word, but it's negative in the sense it points to a bleaker future, and makes me apprehensive about bringing our baby girl into the world: The first few years of life are the brain's most important developmental years, and we want to put off the brain rot as long as possible, but how long can that be for n today's society of nonsense videos and social media becoming the equivalent of junk food for our brains? As technology gets smarter and smarter, human brains are getting dumber, an insidious inverse proportion that we seem powerless to stop. I was just reading today another article about how colleges are having a lot of trouble right now, and I get it: why are students paying up for ever-increasing school tuition while the potential value of those degrees from college are ever decreasing due to the rise of AI? Is it better for a student's future to be spending it in liberal arts programs at expensive private universities or getting a trade school education to specialize in some expertise that is less prone to AI taking over? MJ wants our baby to eventually go to a top college, but that seems a little short-sighted and not looking out towards what will happen in 18 years, how the whole college process will even look like in 18 years. If you believe in the AI reckoning that some are championing (in fact, the odds-on favorite for 2025's Time Person of the Year is AI, or someone who is the face of AI like Jensen Huang), I'm not sure how colleges can survive in that environment where AI are doing 90% of the jobs.......isn't college mostly for training students to get a job? What happens when there are no jobs to get? Is college just a gathering place for young people of a certain age? In that case, I don't see why students can't just meet up or join groups instead of commit themselves to a lifetime of debt going to a four-year university. Anyway, the 2025 Word of the Year is.....rage bait. I feel like this word is a bit behind the times as this type of activity has been going on for years in the form of trolling, "flame wars," or just being mean in general online, and many Youtubers/online content creators/professional trolls/even legitimate business have found out it's a good business model: people will click when they feel strong emotions, whether it's happy, sad, angry, scared......any of these will get clicks, and rage has stood out as the one that people are capitalizing on. All the moderate posts and thought-out articles that give both sides of arguments (the ones I like to hear) are replaced or at least outshone by rage clickbaity titles online, and in that way it's a cycle of making the most infuriating articles and radical titles to articles the most clicked on and the "popular" opinion. It's again like high school where the most popular win out, not necessarily the most truthful, the most well reasoned, well researched, or best. Just the most rage-inducing (usually hateful, victim-blaming, hostility-inciting). "Rage bait" won out over "aura farming" - neutral word, kind of interest, and biohacking, a positive word which MJ and I have tried to do, hack by own biology and how my body works to get better outcomes. One biohack I learnd this year: blood sugar tips for sleeping through the night: I can't give in to the hunger at night and feed it food to lower my blood sugar and get back to sleep, I have to train myself not to expect sugar and go back to sleep naturally, without a sugar rush, otherwise I will constantly wake up in the middle of the night expecting it. Maybe a good lesson for baby's sleep training!