A Decade of “Words of the Year”
Every year since 2004, Oxford University Press has chosen a “word of the year,” based on usage compiled from news sources across the English-speaking world. Today, speaker and author Abdu Murray describes how words reflect and explain culture:
Oxford’s annual “Word of the Year” is more than a linguistic curiosity. It’s a cultural MRI, a snapshot of what society fears, desires, and obsesses over. Looking at the winners from 2016 through 2025 reveals a decade-long narrative of what has been called reality collapse: a decreasing ability to perceive the world directly, unmediated by algorithms, outrage engines, and the gravitational pull of our own preferences.
The trend started with the 2016 Word of the Year, post-truth, capturing the moment when feelings began to outweigh facts. Post-truth was not about sloppy thinking, but a declaration of near-divine autonomy: If truth is whatever I feel most intensely, reality becomes something I generate, not something I discover. This was the initial push down the cultural descent into curated unreality.
A year later came youthquake, the idea that a surge of young people could shake the social and political order. It captured the energy of those convinced they could reshape society through activism. But the youth who embodied the post-truth youthquake are now nearly ten years older. The generation that helped define post-truth and youthquake has bequeathed a landscape where reality collapse has accelerated.
The Words of the Year that followed, utilized by the successors to the millennials, were eerily accurate reflections of the ecosystems that millennials built. In 2022, goblin mode was the Word of the Year. It captured a cultural embrace of laziness, a retreat from discipline and ambition—a far cry from youthquake. In 2023, rizz emerged, reflecting performative charisma—identity as performance, crafted for an algorithmic audience. In 2024, brain rot admitted what many had long suspected: endless scrolling, dopamine-baiting feeds, and digital passivity were hollowing out young minds. The promise of youthquake’s energy had given way to devices shaping cognition, fragmenting attention, and eroding mental resilience.
Then came 2025, and the language of reality collapse became even more precise. The winner, rage bait, describes content that provokes anger to keep people in line with their groups’ ideologies and online to perpetuate them. Exaggeration or outright falsehoods bait us to believe the world is perpetually at war, conditioning us to view disagreement as insanity and nuance as betrayal. This year’s runner-up, aura farming, reflects a subtler, but equally pervasive phenomenon. Young people are striving to cultivate a curated self-image online—an aura that requires effort to maintain, polish, and present. “Farming” is the right word: the image must be sown, tended, and harvested. It is pressure to constantly self-create, where authenticity is measured in likes, shares, and comments.
Rage bait hijacks perception externally, while aura farming enslaves the self internally. One distorts the world; the other distorts identity. In both cases, young people are made to live in a perpetual state of construction and reaction, as if their worth and reality depend entirely on their ability to perform, provoke, and curate.
Christianity offers a liberating counter-narrative, which may account for why we’re seeing a surge in Bible sales and downloads. The Bible insists that our identity is not something we must endlessly manufacture. Rather, it is bestowed. Humans are created in God’s image, which carries inherent dignity, creativity, and capacity for authentic relationship. The God-given image frees us from the tyranny of being defined by our curated presences, our reactions to outrage, or the attention economy—we are defined by the one who made us. We are free to discover once again.
Truth, in this framework, is not a subjective feeling or a self-fashioned projection. Truth is a Person. Jesus is the ultimate anchor for reality: unchanging, compassionate, and authoritative. He validates our feelings by bringing them into alignment with what actually is. He calls us to see the world as it is, not as the algorithms present it. He invites us to resist the cognitive and emotional conditioning of brain rot, aura farming, and rage bait.
The last decade of Words of the Year teaches us that when we try to feel our way into truth, our reality collapses. When we allow algorithms, outrage, or curated self-performance to define reality, we fragment into rage, passivity, and distortion. But when we anchor ourselves in the reality of God’s image, we reclaim the capacity for thoughtful engagement, creativity, and authentic relationships—both with Him and with others who share that image.
Anchored in that reality, we are free to see clearly, think independently, and act with integrity. We are not mere brains to be conditioned; we are image bearers called to resist the collapse, grounded in the one Truth who steadies us.
Thanks Abdu. Today’s Breakpoint commentary is adapted from Abdu Murray’s forthcoming book, Fake ID: How AI and Identity Ideology are Collapsing Reality – And What to Do About It.
Photo Credit: ©iStock/Getty Images Plus/firebrandphotography
John Stonestreet is President of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, and radio host of BreakPoint, a daily national radio program providing thought-provoking commentaries on current events and life issues from a biblical worldview. John holds degrees from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (IL) and Bryan College (TN), and is the co-author of Making Sense of Your World: A Biblical Worldview.
The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of CrosswalkHeadlines.
BreakPoint is a program of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. BreakPoint commentaries offer incisive content people can't find anywhere else; content that cuts through the fog of relativism and the news cycle with truth and compassion. Founded by Chuck Colson (1931 – 2012) in 1991 as a daily radio broadcast, BreakPoint provides a Christian perspective on today's news and trends. Today, you can get it in written and a variety of audio formats: on the web, the radio, or your favorite podcast app on the go.
