I was eating a bacon egg and cheese scallion pancake when a bloke handed me a waffle man I'm overcooked

9 ideas on how culture on social media works in 2025

Note: Bit longer of a post so it doesn’t fit in the email view but it’s mostly pictures. So open it in Substack, treat it like a picture book, and enjoy!

There’s this 441 page slideshow that went viral recently. It talked about social media signals - what’s in, what’s out, what’s coming in, what has the opportunity to be in, how people feel about all of that, and generally what the vibes are on the internet nowadays.

I thought it was the best thing I’ve read all year. I spent hours pouring over this because I’m a huge geek when it comes to understanding how humans think and relate to each other, and social media is probably the main way everyone my age does that now. I ended up saving about 30 slides in particular that made me stop and think for a bit.

1) Main character syndrome is taking over

I never heard about main character energy before 2 years ago, and now it’s everywhere. It was kind of empowering at first but now it just seems like a nicer way to say “selfish”. I get the point - appreciate your life more and have the faith that everything will work out. But no one can ever touch the main character, and everyone else is less important than them, which is a pretty shit way to live when most of my best times haven’t happened alone. Putting yourself above everyone else is a great way to never feel like you have any equals, which is super isolating.

2) The process behind the art matters as much as the art

BTS videos do orders of magnitude better than the actual video sometimes. People want to know the why before they know the what. Taylor Swift’s new album launched with a “movie” that had her talk about the process of each song and the music video before they were played. This is likely in response to most of the world being afraid of AI, and to know the artist’s intentions makes media much more enjoyable than knowing it came from the black box slop factory.

BTW, Charli XCX’s substack is actually pretty good. Even she talks about how important it is to make the audience feel involved now as an artist.

3) We’re all tired of brainrot

Everyone knows social media is bad for them, but like cigarettes, you can’t quit so easily. To the point where there’s whole movements to reset your brain and regain your childlike sense of wonder. Dopamine fasts were around years ago too, but now it’s hit mainstream, and it’s not just about sitting still and doing nothing but actually enjoying what you consume.

Social media used to be fun and weird and being chronically online felt like being part of a cool secret club. But now that the smartest people in the world are working their hardest to get you hooked so you can swallow their ads with no chaser, no one’s having fun anymore.

Speaking of cigs…

4) Cigarettes are in.

Legitimately how did we get back here. I’ve never smoked in my life but even I keep seeing short form content that makes me want to try it. Friends are legitimately addicted. Maybe it’s that vaping was in and people wanted something stronger, but I think it’s more that cigarettes are legitimately cool now. They make you look cool, having wine and a cigarette is cool, Europe and Asia are cool and they smoke, skinny cigs are cool, taking smoke breaks is cool because going outside is cool (since everyone’s so online). So it’s a lot of little compounding factors that spilled over into cigarettes entering mainstream culture again. If I wasn’t so against supporting things I don’t want to see in the world, buying tobacco stocks would probably be a pretty lucrative move right now.

5) Anytime there’s culture, there exists an opportunity for counter-culture.

Culture is cyclical, and everything that’s old becomes new again, which is why we’ll see mom jeans and dad shoes trending til the end of time. Once you internalize this concept you see it everywhere. Being online was in on the early internet, now everyone does it, so going outside and dopamine fasting (doing nothing) is in. Fast paced jump cut content was in because of Tiktok, but now people are deliberately slowing down their content and making it longer to combat overstimulation.

Walking is in. Run clubs are in. So my friend Danielle decided to make a “Sit Club” that 1000 people showed up to in San Francisco. It was hilarious and got a ton of press and social media attention, because running and walking were already in the zeitgeist so everyone’s primed to understand the joke.

You can also take what’s in but put it in a place people don’t expect. Like bathhouses are entering culture as a third space beyond bars and restaurants to hang out at, but hosting a corporate event at one is incredibly counterintuitive, which is exactly why people will talk about it.

6) Being weird is so in.

Speaking of counter-culture, when a pattern is too established, people start to hate it no matter how good it is. Like a song being overplayed, everyone intuitively knows the pattern of every single form of content they doom scroll to a tee. So when something disrupts that, and it’s somewhat interesting, funny, or causes you to mentally say “WTF”, it feels like a breath of fresh air. This works especially well for brands because people have more solid preconceived expectations around them.

I don’t give half a shit about Ramp, On or Birkin but these promos are genuinely pretty cool, and I’ll remember them for breaking the mold. The reason ads that look like ads don’t work is because they’re forgettable. The best ads make you remember something you previously didn’t care about at all, so that when it’s time to make a buying decision you’re already primed.

7) Create what you live in

Every lifestyle vlog feels a little off to me because I wonder if they actually live like that or they’ve started living a life that looks good to a vlog. I personally don’t call myself a writer even though I write every week, because I’m just a guy who lives and happens to write when I feel like thinking through something a bit more.

The best art comes from drawing on personal experiences. Write what you know and all that. I love Timothee Chalamet’s promo for Marty Supreme. I don’t even think of it as promo. I’m super excited for this movie, and I’m not even a Chalamet fan, but he promotes that movie like he promotes himself because he’s all about the pursuit of greatness just like the main character of the movie.

I often get sidetracked when making stuff thinking about what’s trending and what’ll grab attention. But my stuff that circulates the most and resonates the most with people is when I talk about my feelings, or if I myself am laughing while making the thing. Like Charli XCX says, “If it doesn’t come from a truthful or meaningful place for the artist […] the work is totally fucking DOA.”

8) It’s easy to stand out if you care a lot

Even though there’s so much content out there, it’s easier than ever to be noticed. The algorithms are so good that you get hand delivered to your ideal audience. All the content in the world is a mountain of hay, but the algorithms are incredibly powerful magnets looking for needles 24/7.

Getting a few views but having people really love your stuff isn’t actually a bad thing at all. The algos pick out lots of slop because human desire isn’t actually as pure as we’d like. We’re easily enraged and amused by stuff our higher minds might disapprove of. The thing it, we’re realizing it now, and everyone’s preferences are slowly changing. We love cake even though it’s bad for us, but we’re all realizing that too much cake is hurting us, so now we’re switching up our taste and diet.

People are now more aware of attention as currency, and are giving it to more deserving media each day. Our taste is getting more refined, and the algos cater to taste perfectly, which makes it the best time to make a masterpiece and have it seen by people who’ll care about it.

9) Remind people you exist

With the switch to algorithmic feeds, even if you put something out, you likely gotta put it out a couple times in a couple different ways for people to actually see it, even your followers. Social media rewards the courageous over the intelligent. It might feel a little shameful, but if you truly think what you made is good, why deprive people the chance to see your thing? Surely they’ll prefer what you make over their 95th slop video of the day in the middle of their doomscroll, right?

If you’re struggling to come up with what to post, post freaking anything. Start with what you live in, and the feeds are so smart nowadays that it’ll find it’s way to who it’s meant for. People love feeling like they’ve found a diamond in the rough, and are craving real life so much that they’re actually more intrigued by something that looks unpolished but interesting rather than “content”.

Bonus: 10) inspo/laughs/ponderings

Inspo

Colin and Samir are awesome. I didn’t know it took so long for them to get the attention they deserved. Similarly, for one of my favourite writers, it took him 15 years of writing before anyone wanted to talk to him about his work.

I’m a raptors fan and these posters are fire. Also really cool that people can just post their art on Twitter and get paid for it per impression now. Never a better time to make cool stuff and share it online.

I never consciously thought of these errors as ways to hook someone, I feel like the fish being caught, but cool to know you can use “faults” this way.

Similarly, I’ve seen these types of videos before everywhere, but never thought of them as a “format” where the first frame is meant to invoke a specific emotion.

Laughs

Banger. Funny to think about big brands spending millions to replicate a 16 year old with a Tiktok addiction and no filter.

1. Banger motto for anyone afraid of not being original with what they make.

2. Even the national parks service has a social media specialist now. I bet he’s pretty good.

No way they actually did this. Reminds me of Amazon Boy.

Ponderings

Yes these things are on the up and the brands are going to use them to sell us things. But also further proves the slop uprising, which means there will also be a counter slop uprising. I predict next year anti-brainrot/brain-recover content will be a thing.

I wonder how much of everything I see online is a subtle attempt to sell me something. Even the people who say they’re not selling you anything when they’re small or act authentic change their ways as they grow and need money. You can’t even show your phone anymore without it turning into a marketing opportunity.

There’s this $5 app called Dumbify I’ve been using for the past year. Highly recommend. I try to make my phone as un-addicting as possible which involves:

• hiding all the addicting apps with face id so they don’t show in app library, search or history by default

• muting everyone I don’t care about on Instagram

• muting everyone that remotely annoys me or is hateful on Twitter

• disabling double tap to wake

• black and white mode (though I rarely keep this up because I watch netflix on my phone and forget to turn it back on)

• disabling animations/motion

• disabling notifications from almost every app

• always being on do not disturb, allowlisting only family and close friends

That’s all the slides I saved. Hope you learned something! Email me if you have any thoughts on this or read it yourself, I’d love to chat about it: aadillpickle@gmail.com