2025: The weird, the glitch, falling upward, and everything is waiting for you

The throughlines I am pulling into 2025

It’s been a weird year. And that’s an understatement.

Then I read a prediction for 2025 by brand strategist and founder of the Concept Bureau, Jasmine Bina. In her recent article entitled, The Only Prediction That Matters to Me as a Brand Strategist in 2025, she highlights the strange ecotones that have been arising across politics, popular culture, the economy, etc over the past year.

Jasmine writes:

I’m not talking about “shock value weird” or “gross weird”. I’m talking about the kind of weirdness we feel when we’re forced to embrace contradictions, and contradictions are starting to show up everywhere. Think off-grid influencers, breadwinning tradwives, crypto-bro environmentalists, and the voters that picked both AOC and Trump on the same ballot. But don’t get caught up in the moral discourse here.

Instead, pay attention to the contradictions that are being forced together. Try to feel for a moment what it means to reject society and have millions of followers on TikTok, or believe in democratic ideals and trust a republican leader to make them happen. More and more people are openly embodying conflicting truths, and if you ask them about it, they’ll tell you it’s freeing. It’s who they are.

Humans are messy and in an algorithmic world where two-dimensional authenticity has forced us into shallow labels and binary tribes, we’ve been ignoring the fact that in our most authentic state, humans are not easy to categorize at all.

Could this weird time be the confusing rumblings of a new era that rejects “cancel culture” and instead welcomes contradictions, a time that welcomes the glitchy overlap of contradicting binaries?

Jasmine argues we are in an era of “Post-Authenticity.” At first, I was sad by this term. Are we a giant monoculture of droids with a lack of authenticity? No, that’s not what this means:

It’s a turning inward—a movement forward: a portal.

The Glitch as Portal

It feels like we are in or are approaching a glitch. “Glitch Feminism,” by Legacy Russell, is a manifesto I was obsessed with a few years ago. Russell reimagines the concept of a "glitch"—usually seen as a tech malfunction—as a means to challenge societal norms around gender, race, and identity. She suggests that by embracing these "glitches," individuals can break free from traditional constraints and explore new ways of self-expression. The book also highlights contemporary artists who embody these ideas, showing how digital spaces can be platforms for personal and collective liberation—perhaps examples of “Post-Authenticity.” Russell writes:

The glitch is an activist prayer, a call to action, as we work toward fantastic failure, breaking free of an understanding of gender as something stationary [page 14].

What if the "glitch" isn't just a technological metaphor but a spiritual invitation? A moment where fantastic failures become breakthroughs, where the contradictions we embody reveal entirely new ways of being?

Falling Upward

Richard Rohr, my favorite Franciscan monk, argues that spiritual growth often requires embracing our limitations rather than overcoming them. Rohr writes in one of his weekly newsletters:

Any talk of growth, achievement, climbing, improving, and progress highly appeals to the ego. But the only way we stay on the path with any authenticity is to constantly experience our incapacity to do it, our failure at doing it. That’s what makes us, to use my language, fall upward. Otherwise, we’re really not climbing; we’re just thinking we’re climbing by saying to ourselves, “Look, I’m better today. Look, I’m holier than I was last week. Look, my prayer is improving.” That really doesn’t teach us anything or lead us anywhere new.

In contrast, it is recognizing, “Richard, you don’t know how to love at all” that keeps me on the path of love. Constant failure at loving is ironically and paradoxically what keeps us learning how to love. When we think we’re there, there’s nothing to learn.

Everything is Waiting for You

David Whyte offers me a final, grounding reminder as I head into 2025. He calls us to see the interconnectedness of all things and to pay attention to the divinity in the mundane.

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the
conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

– “Everything is Waiting for You” by David Whyte

This alertness to the present, the everyday, and the overlooked is how we find our place in the glitchy, paradoxical world we inhabit.

The Invitation

So, what does all this mean for 2025? It’s an invitation to absorb the contradictions rather than resolve them. To see failures, not as static moments but as the unfolding process. And to pay attention to the overlooked, the mundane, the small details that quietly anchor us in a weird, shared world.

The weirdness, the glitches, the discomfort—they’re not the detours, but the terrain. And in walking it, we might find connective, nourishing throughlines in the chaos.