What Troubled You in 2025?
An end of year New Critic symposium
What troubled you in 2025? is the question we asked our writers to wrap the year. What agitated you, bothered you, kept you awake at night — solved, overcome, or yet to be answered? All the essays and conversations we feature in The New Critic answer to discomfort. The responses below capture something of the spirit of our generation this year, our troubles, our questions, and our triumphs.
Isabel Mehta, 23 | “The Vagueness of Her Discontent”
I think about this year — the days and days and days — and what did it yield? Many nights simply wondering: What, exactly, is happening? The more I make a home in my mind, the more I lose touch with the pragmatic rhythm of society. Yet the closer I exist on this social, integrated energy wave, sometimes the farther I feel from my soul. Can reading save me? Can people save me? Maybe, almost. I have a hunch that the last sliver of hope in a life well-lived — both in the head and in the world — requires real conviction. It’s something I am searching for. The question that troubled me most this year, which often kept me up at night, was whether or not one day I will find it. Whether or not one day my values will be strong enough to disentangle appearance from reality. It seems bleak but it is far from that. These questions are the keys to the universe, the answers to which I really have no business knowing. If I could guess, I think it is going to be about people. Yet for now, as Rilke says, I must settle with loving the questions themselves, and the way in which sometimes, in the middle of the night, the faint shimmer of an answer makes itself known.
Jonas Rosenthal, 22 | “Plaster Books in a Concrete Prison”
This year I have been reading as much as I can — fiction, non-fiction, and journalism — about the United Kingdom in the seventies. Between 1970 and 1979 British society fell apart to a degree almost unparalleled in any other rich, democratic, and peaceful postwar state. The Empire disintegrated; the economy collapsed in a terrifying mixture of inflation and unemployment; mass violence broke out first in Northern Ireland and then in Britain; trade unions brought down two governments in some of the largest strikes in British history (including the notorious gravediggers strike); and all three political parties were discredited — the Conservatives by the disastrous Heath government; Labour by the shabby corruption of the second Wilson government; and the Liberals by a bizarre scandal involving the shooting of a dog on a remote Welsh moor. Yet remarkably I have found most of the dominant politicians and trade unionists of the period to be intensely admirable figures. Most were from working class backgrounds, had earned scholarships to Oxford and Cambridge where they excelled academically, volunteered for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, fought with distinction in the Second World War, scrupulously tried to avoid corruption, self-interest, and partisanship, and worked sixteen hour days in public office, breaking only to read the poetry of Blake (Denis Healey), watch cricket (Michael Foot), or tend to goldfish (Hugh Scanlon). One might think we would be lucky to have such politicians today, and yet under their careful watch their country was led to ruin. If such a crop of well-intentioned, well-informed, well-educated, well-meaning, well-considered, and well-disciplined politicians could not improve their lot, what hope do any of us have?
Clare Ashcraft, 22 | “The Loss of Reciprocity”
In 2025, AI became nearly impossible to avoid. Every app tried to embed it, and in my workplace and my household I kept hearing, “Have you asked ChatGPT yet?” Mostly, people in my life were using it to help brainstorm product names or troubleshoot tech issues — innocent things. Still, AI will inevitably transform us in ways we can’t foresee, as the internet already has, and I’m sad for what we will lose. AI will make us more efficient and independent, but I’m increasingly worried that it’s the extreme independence from our peers that’s making our generation sick.
The point of AI seems to be to move faster and get more done to move faster and get more done. At what point are we to thoughtfully experience our lives? We’re productivity hacking our way to what end? There are famously about four thousand weeks in our lives. How many of those weeks are spent with our parents or our best friend? In theory, AI could allow us to get the same amount of work done more quickly, enabling us to spend more time with our loved ones, but I think that’s unlikely. I look at the loneliness and dating crises of Gen Z, and I see AI enabling isolation. Often friends are made over common projects: workplaces, hobby groups, bands, etc. But who will hire a coder or intern when AI exists? Who will bother with a band when you can produce a song in minutes? I worry that AI resistance may die out and we might collectively and unknowingly choose technological convenience over spending our short four thousand weeks well.
Will Diana, 23 | “Finding a Scene among the Corporate and the Damned”
In Fireworks, Visions of the End
“Ce monde n’est qu’une immense enterprise de se foutre du monde”
– Céline.
There is really only one thing that troubles everyone, anything else is just a variation on that theme. This year, it goes like this: it was once 2024, now it is 2025, it will be 2026. With every passing moment we march closer, not just toward our own deaths, but also toward a future that will be increasingly foreign to us, that will make us all nothing more than awkward anachronisms. We are all prisoners on this earth, imprisoned by temptation, suffering, and death, or in other words, imprisoned by the very things that make us human. We seek godliness, immortality in failing things: progress, knowledge, beauty, wealth, all that fails, rots, passes away, all that is buried in the sands, is drowned in the ocean...
There are two ideas one can have in face of this:
Life is cyclical; in eternal recurrence, we are sentenced to wearily act out our own sins and our own punishments, forever, with no hope for change except by escaping the system entirely (if escape is possible). Our current understanding of the Big Bang seems to support this, by way of Buddhism and Ecclesiastes.
Life leads to an end; through an onward march, the world’s essence slowly reveals itself to us in pendulum swings of face and reverse, of light and dark, onward and upward forever, creating motion through these endless reversals, eventually leading to a better world. The only way out is through.
Regardless, we will grow old and die, we will one day be strangers walking down streets we used to rule, we will forget the ones closest to us, and we will be forgotten too. Out of this, everything else emerges: AI dystopia/utopia, the rise of tyranny, the slaughter of innocents, the destruction of the world. All are symptoms of a universe that creates us just for us to die. But the new year is coming and the fireworks are going off. So for now, forget all that other nonsense: the new year is coming, count down those seconds till the ball drops, kiss the hottest person in arm’s reach, drink something bad for your liver, listen to good music, wander the streets of the world knowing that this moment will pass too, but at least it’s good.
Peace and Love, Will Diana.
Everett Yum, 20 | “In Defense of the Personal Essay”
One kid from my high school graduated this year and began a gap year working for Palantir as a “Meritocracy Fellow.” Now, as far as I can tell, he’s no longer planning to attend college and has been promoted to “Forward Deployed AI Engineer.” I’m worried that any company is trying to poach impressionable 18-year-olds for full-time labor, in this case convincing them that college is nothing more than “four years of prerequisites, debt, and indoctrination.” College isn’t for everyone, but it serves as a crucial transition between childhood and independent adulthood, and the liberal arts teach us empathy and critical thought. If I didn’t go to college or do anything comparable, I would be emotionally immature, socially addled, and a lot dumber. “You don’t have to wait until 2030 to do real things,” says Palantir. But 2026 high school graduates do need to wait to become fully formed human beings, and laboring in the military-industrial complex would sooner make robots than actual people out of them. Palantir’s antipathy towards the dogma of the “college industrial complex” is itself a dogma, viewing professional, self-important work as a substitute for a humanistic education, which it is not. I hope that kid from my high school realizes Palantir’s primary goal isn’t to give him a subversive, “genuine” education; it’s to make money.
Milla Ben-Ezra, 21 | “The Disappearing Act”
There’s a section in my college’s main library where the staff are conducting a data collection survey. They’ve placed notes in each book, indicating the number of times the text has been checked out since 1990. My thesis carrel is situated right in this section, and every day this past semester I’ve walked by at least a dozen stacks, filled floor to ceilings, of books with these kinds of survey sheets, each of which reads: 0 checkouts since 1990. I’ve seen maybe five with more than a single checkout. This was devastating to me — either people don’t read these books or don’t check them out. The most troubling part was that after I finished working at my carrel each day, I left myself without checking out a single one.
George Porteous, 21 | “The Attention Seekers”
Is it ever possible to know another person’s mind? We humans have invented a few techniques to try and overcome our apparent structural invisibility to each other. Language has served us well for the past few millennia, as have art and music, which seem best able to communicate deep emotional experience. The best journalism can provide us with a base of shared reality, the only possible starting point of a tolerant society. Love persuades us, when we’re inside it, that we know another soul, without even the need to speak.
Yet failures of communication seemed to run deep this year. Despite technologies that purport to bring us together — externalizing more information about us than ever before — Americans are lonelier and more divided. Too many have confused the inevitable challenges of forging personal bonds with intolerable labor. In the meantime, AI chatbots offer a frictionless affirmation of the self, or even the illusion of intimacy. Perhaps it won’t be long before AI-enabled neural implants allow us to withdraw further into ourselves.
In 2026, I wonder how we might recommit to the difficult work of making sense of each other. There might not be an answer to the philosophical problem of solipsism: all of us are trapped, to some degree, in our own minds. But life can’t be lived alone. To attain a more equal economy, a healthier political discourse, and stronger relationships, we first need to have faith in each other, even when the gulfs between us seem vast.
Theo Gary, 22 | “Blue Guys”
I am troubled by the unwillingness of others to share in my understanding of what is Good and True and Beautiful. They should be thrown in jail.
Eva Murillo, 21 | “From the Mouth of the Flytrap”
I learned this year that Swarthmore, where I go to college, spends about $110k a year on each student. I used some of that money to conduct ethnographic research in southeastern Kentucky this summer. While there, I learned that what Swarthmore spends on me is three times the median income of an entire household in the county where I worked.
Elite colleges and universities are wealth-hoarding institutions. It is entirely unjust that a place like Swarthmore can exist in the same nation as a county where one fourth of the population lives in poverty.
I loved doing ethnography this summer. I think the method is a powerful tool for understanding other humans — it demands immense trust-building, curiosity, and engagement. But because the ivory tower is the only real patron of ethnographic research, it serves, at least materially, the researcher more than the typically-not-privileged “researched.” Successful anthropologists get publications and tenure; their interlocutors get an advocate at best, but more likely a small voice in a sea of articles and jargon. Ethnography, despite what anthropology majors might hope, achieves very little in the way of liberation from a vastly unequal world.
If I believe that the system of higher education in this country is unjust, how can I justify going into anthropology? Is there a Robin Hood approach to doing academia, where I could milk my institutions for all they’re worth and redistribute that wealth? Or, if I really care about making the world a better place, should I give up the dream of having my cake (a cushy academic job) and eating it too (thieving from the spoon that feeds me)?
Josie Barboriak, 21 | “Nietzsche in Friendship”
We cannot get out from under these conditions. Scrambling under rocks at national parks the hats belong to Goldman and the cars belong to Tesla. Maybe the Plot, the machinery, owns us all. You could unilaterally change the world, he says, without convincing people, without politics, through technological means. Under these conditions must the Academy become a military-school? At parties, Connecticut’s depressives assemble words and scraps of paper in a warm-lit moment, then stay in bed and put off job applications. We here are benevolent and prone to disappearing. New York’s socialites dress up as adults and measure politics by aesthetic standards. We here are cunning and conceal from ourselves the stakes. In the Bay the technologists claim a monopoly on evidence, distill life’s richness into autistic equations. Without politics philosophy has no hands and no teeth. It is clear that to develop a soul under the wrong conditions will kill you. It is only too late that one regrets the obituary written in the voice of the Machine. For this to mean something we have to put our bodies behind it. But we’ve come just a year too late. A three-story yacht gleams like a spaceship in the harbor. Three thousand doctorates’ worth of yacht. The future is dissolving just in time for my hands to close.
Elan Kluger, 22 | “All of Russell’s Men”
Politics troubled me this year. Not gripes about Trump or Israel or college campuses or tax cuts or tax increases or Putin or Orban or Covid or veganism or welfare or whether millennial white males make up a sufficient percentage of the intellectual workforce. None of these engage me very much, although I can feign interest if need be. Rather, what troubled me was just how dull politics is. On any question, any reasonable person could generate the Republican, Democrat, Communist, Anarchist, Fascist, and Libertarian argument. If one cannot do that, a few more books provide the easy solution. To be a political partisan is to exclusively drive in one lane on a ten lane highway. You will be cramped. Why does everyone participate?
Toni Burns, 22 | “We Ate the Gods”
What troubled me in 2025 was the amount of thinking I did about my relationships at work.
I spent a lot of the year assuming people were my friends when, in retrospect, they were just being friendly. This wasn’t malicious or deceptive; it was simply how work operates. You talk often, you’re pleasant to each other, you share small details, you go for a drink, and something starts to feel established. I filled in the rest myself. When those relationships failed to hold outside the context of work, I felt more unsettled than I expected to.
I also became uncomfortably aware of how much energy I put into being liked. I noticed myself adjusting, performing competence or charm, trying to make myself easy to keep around. It wasn’t forced, exactly, but it was effortful. The troubling part was how normal this felt, and how rarely I questioned it until it started to exhaust me.
At the same time, some real friendships did form. Not many, but enough to matter. People who remained present without requiring much from me, whose interest didn’t spike or fade depending on circumstance. These relationships were quieter and less defined, and I trusted them more because of that. They didn’t ask me to be impressive.
What troubled me wasn’t discovering that not everyone was a friend. It was realising how much I wanted them to be, and how long it took me to notice the difference. I don’t feel resolved about it. I just feel more attentive now — to where I’m placing my effort and to who actually meets it.
Tessa Augsberger, 22 | “In Need of Daydreams”
I adore Patrick Leigh Fermor’s books, and what’s more, I adore his person. However, after finishing his trilogy, which begins with A Time of Gifts, this autumn, I became hooked on Paddy’s letters, and finally his biography. The problem with this is that the latter two tomes “expose” — if you will excuse so prudish a word — dear Paddy for his miraculous, impossible charm. Both Adam Sisman, editor of Paddy’s collected letters, and Paddy’s biographer Artemis Cooper bluntly state that whenever Paddy referred to becoming “great pals” with various people on his travels from London to Constantinople, he was sleeping with them.
I thought Patrick Leigh Fermor was a saint, but in fact he was not. To him I attached such grand ideals as freedom and agency, when he was really, and self-admittedly, too, lust’s servant (and savant) for much of his life. The result of all this is such that he is now raised in my mind from the status of a saint to that of a demigod, and I can no longer hope to possess half his charm, which I had greatly hoped to have.
Rufus Knuppel, 21 | “True Impressions of Our Education, Pt. II”
When I arrived in London this fall to study, I expected to slither into the bazaars and boulevards of the lost metropolis I imagined in my youth across the pond. More than that, I thought in the climates of the old world I would molt my anxieties like a shell and emerge from the cage of my pubescent discontents with silken confidence and clarity. I found none of this abroad, I did not unsheathe my mind from trouble, instead I stood face to face with ugliness and innocence.
I am tempted to say of our times: that if one goes searching for an older world, they shall find that that world has ceased to be, that today’s world is all one hulking and terrific America, that the new world has swallowed the old. That indeed there is no outside to America and that modernity is one great nauseous panorama of technological slop. That the old world is hemorrhaging itself to the new with every microchip implanted upon the flesh of nature. That the supernova of Europa has collapsed into imperial fragments and morose antiquities. That though periodic and fleeting glimpses of the flames of past lives trickle through the bars of our digital condition, the light is the projection of a film, a temporary emotion that we can only observe in intangible, distant motion, long for, and wait to end. That everything great has been stripped of its halo and aura. That we live today amidst the grim current of modernity: the project to domesticate wildness and commodify enchantment until we have worked to grind each repository of beauty and humanity into the dust of capital. That the end of history means the death of our past.
But I won’t.
There is much we can learn from our fantasies, for often they allude to the structures and scenes of more coherent and benevolent realities than our own. But I came to believe this year that my fantasy of Europe was a distortion of a world that had never really been: a world that was all my own, the projection of an interior enchantment, and the superimposition of an indolent impulse — my desire for the world to be neat and beautiful and clear. In fact, the world was none of these ordered things. It had never been legible or symmetric, and it never would be. The better exercise, I realized, would consist of identifying and ameliorating the present conditions of my community — my life — not to flee from the idea that I was an American, but to bear the pride and weight of my homeland’s marvelous burden. Not to make haste from the present in search of genies to conjure the spell, not to shrivel into the dank burrows of any hibernating past, but to shoulder all the effort that living today required of me, its brutality, its complexity, and its exaltation.
Our era is the age of overwhelm. The cumulative relics of the world lie at our feet. And charging through any atmospheric artery in any grimy Gotham with the mellifluous Freddie Gibbs tinkling in my ears reminds me that I live today and not any other. Henry James never heard “Crime Pays.” Live with hunger for the present and the world shall rarely disappoint.
Cheers to all, and Happy New Year!
