2025: The Emergence of the New Zeitgeist?
I sit down with Jemima Kelly, columnist at the Financial Times, to discuss the culture-shifting moments of 2024 and how they will impact us in 2025
Last year saw an interesting shift in the political and cultural zeitgeist. From the dominance of world-wide elections to the continued emphasis (to the point of insistence) on how to be well to the bouncing of Bitcoin amongst other things. It was a lot to take in and make sense of. How are all these things contributing towards our current and future culture, and how do we make sense of it without looking at it all together?
I’ve written about two “Words of the Year” for 2024 – brain rot and manifest – which together, suggests that we’re overwhelmed with meaningless information which doesn’t serve anyone except the person pushing the algorithm in their favour, and that we’re looking towards ourselves, our own inner power, belief and faith, to make things better. That’s my take anyway, but I thought that it would be fun to consult someone who has written about these subjects and interconnected ones – from Bitcoin to Trump to wellness – to get their perspective. Who better than Jemima Kelly, the Financial Times’ “resident contrarian” and columnist who also has a new regular column in the Financial Times’ HTSI Magazine (of which I personally love) called “Adventures in Woo-Woo”?
As 2025 begins and 2024 is now a year of the past, I thought it would be fascinating to review and get a snapshot of 2024 with Jemima and understand how the events of 2024 will trickle (and potentially snowball) throughout 2025. Her choice of words to summarise 2024 – vibes, hubris and reckoning – is, I think, very telling for how the new zeitgeist will emerge this year, the half-way point of the 2020’s, particularly with Trump taking office later on this month.
We discuss this and much more. Enjoy!
Joanna: Hi Jemima! For my readers who are new to you, can you tell us a little about yourself and your column for the Financial Times?
Jemima: I have a weekly column which appears on a Monday morning in the paper and usually goes online on a Sunday morning. And it's in what's called the “ideas slot”. It doesn't actually have a tag saying ideas at the top, but internally we call it the ideas slot.
I also write features – those could be magazine features, they could be Lunch with the FT, the Weekend Essay which is on the cover of the Life and Arts section, or travel features like the one I’ve just done on South Korea. I also have a new quarterly column in our glossy HTSI mag called Adventures in Woo which I love as a title, because it’s playful but also it's got the same cadence and starting letters as Alice in Wonderland, who I have been compared to a few times in my life!
The new column came about because I became increasingly interested in various forms of spirituality and personal development. People think it's weird that I'm a skeptic about a lot of things and I'm known for being very questioning of everything yet I’m really open to some of this stuff that a lot of people think is bullshit. I think it makes sense to try it. And so the HTSI editor suggested we should start a column on this exact thing. My first column is about “tapping”, and it came out at the start of this month.
Joanna: One of the topics you’ve written about a lot has been wellness in its various forms, from the benefits of switching off our phones to neuroaesthetics and their views on beauty and nature to the art of savouring.
Wellness is a subject that fascinates me too. We’re at a point where our experience of wellness and what it means to be well at a most basic level, from how we work to how we engage with language, nature and technology is being questioned by everyone. I think it’s one of the reasons why your column is so popular; you’re writing about topics which resonate with our basic human needs and sensibilities.
If we lived in a “well” society which culturally and professionally prioritised wellness, we wouldn’t have to remind ourselves about it so much, it would already be a given. When and why do you think we lost our common understanding of wellness/what it means to be well?
Jemima: It's tempting to imagine that there was a time in the past where we had everything right. I think that’s a fantasy and I'm not sure we've ever been at a place where we have properly prioritised “wellness” (I don’t love the term). The fact that we talk so much about mental health is a huge step forward, but I think that can go too far. In the book The Coddling of the American Mind one of the main arguments is that younger Millennials and Gen Z have been overexposed to the idea that we mustn't be triggered, we mustn't face anything that's emotionally uncomfortable. We've equated physical suffering with emotional suffering. And there's been this massive over-pathologization of discomfort.
I think that often progress comes with a kind of correction. You go far too far and then things will come back and they’ll have actually progressed. That's how progress often happens. But sometimes people are pushed too far, and then you get a backlash. I think in some ways we are at a better place than where we were before in terms of mental health. There’s been a move towards making it easier for men to talk about emotional difficulty. And I think that's really important.
The other thing I would say, and it actually ties into this book that I've just finished called The Sovereignty of Good by Iris Murdoch (which I wrote a New Year’s column on) is the decline of discussion about love and how weird that is, as well as the loss of ritual and community which is all connected to the decline of religion. And then obviously overusing smartphones is antithetical to so-called wellness, though there are ways where they can help, within limits, with apps like Headspace or the Rapid Tapping app.
Joanna: You’ve written about the possibility of politics becoming more mindful. It’s an important idea worth exploring as being mindful makes us more curious and open to nuanced, thoughtful opinions which enhances understanding and improves decision-making. People are tired of adrenaline-induced politics as it’s numbing us to the importance of politics and the meaning of the political process.
Who would you consider a “mindful” politician? How to do you see the conversations around wellness evolving in the years ahead in a political and cultural context?
Jemima: I’ll answer the second part of that question first. I think these are conversations which are gaining ground. And I personally welcome that. Cambridge University Press made “manifest” their word of the year last year which is a sign that this stuff has been gaining prominence over the last few years. I think a lot of people are peddling snake oil or whatever in this space. But again, there's also a lot of good stuff and it's quite hard to disentangle, which is one of the reasons I'm doing this new HTSI column which is not necessarily endorsing every single thing I try.
In terms of who is a mindful politician, I can’t really think of anyone in the UK who is particularly showing us that, although I do think that religious people tend to be more connected to that side of things (a lot of religion is pretty woo woo!)
I think it's a really interesting thing that we used to talk about “crunchy people” who were people who go to Whole Foods and they're basically hippie-like kind of people, you know, and they were on the left. And yet these days, in the U.S. anyway, there seems to be more discussion of many non-conventional ideas on the right.
We think about the right being small “c” conservative, so you might think they would be supportive of big pharma because they're big corporates and traditionally conservatives are pro-business, but that’s not necessarily the case at the moment and that’s really interesting. Robert F. Kennedy Jr has got this “Make America Healthy Again” thing that Trump is now seeming to be on board with, so it's an interesting reversal.
We’re at a really interesting time in politics, particularly U.S. politics, where we've been talking for a while about how these right and left labels don't make quite as much sense, and obviously in the U.S. the Democrats are to the right of most of the centre-right parties in Europe in many ways. So it's always been a bit weird in the U.S. context, with the Trump division now pushing these ideas of non-conventional medicine, most likely instigated by COVID-19. Much of the defence of big pharma now often comes from the left, with vaccines in particular, so it’s all become a bit muddled. The response from the left to COVID-19 has massively played into the right's favour.
Joanna: You’ve recently written about the “Trump Vibe shift” and the way he has been discussed since 2020. What key things have changed in recent years which have boosted his popularity? What has changed about people’s perceptions about the political process and the character of politicians in recent years which have put people like Trump in office?
Jemima: My favourite topic!
I asked a Ukrainian when I was in LA back in November what he thought of Trump's victory, and he said that he was thrilled because he wants his people to stop dying. And I said, well, aren't you worried about Ukraine being handed to Putin? And he said, oh, well, half of it is going to get handed to Putin anyway. So we might as well get that over with and stop people dying. Obviously, there are some real issues around Trump’s approach to all of this, not least his admiration of Putin. And he has now refused to rule out military force to take over Greenland and the Panama Canal!
But people like the fact that Trump wants to end foreign wars rather than getting tied up in them. A lot of Americans for different reasons agree with him on that. The America First movement has really taken hold of the American right. And a big part of that is becoming more isolationist when it comes to really challenging the old idea of foreign policy being America going out and fighting all these wars. The reason I'm mentioning this is obviously Ukraine and Gaza and Lebanon now too, these wars have all happened since Trump left office, and he has argued that he wouldn’t have let them happen. Of course this is a very convenient argument for him to make, and it’s impossible to prove or disprove, but the fact is that a lot of his supporters believe this to be true.
Another thing is that the agenda which has been pushed by the left in America has often been far too radical for most Americans. It's been a small group of people who believe in that agenda. A lot of them were very vocal on Twitter, or X, and they're all on BlueSky now. That’s very alienating to the majority of Americans, and so Trump’s push against that has massively played into his favour.
Trumps’s use of language is also fascinating. Funnily enough, I would like to do an analysis of Trump's language versus how he spoke in 2016 or 2020 versus other politicians. He talks about love a lot at a time when people aren't talking about love enough. Trump talks a lot about love and beauty and that's really compelling, people want to hear that. His tone has also changed, he’s entered into his grandpa era where he has softened, as a lot of people do when they age.
He sometimes comes across like a slightly sweet granddad by going on all these podcasts with these “podcast bros” and he’s the kind of grandpa-like bumbling figure that goes “oh let me go to the Bitcoin conference” and slightly plays the fool. He’s shifted to Trump the grandpa rather than Trump the “grab them by the pussy guy” — we've not seen any of that this time around. That was the aura around him in 2016. That's not the aura around him now.
He won in 2016 because people wanted to keep Hillary Clinton out. He lost in 2020 because people wanted to get Trump out. He won in 2024 because people love Trump. That was the vibe shift.
It wasn't because people wanted to keep Kamala Harris out. I don't buy that. I don't buy this narrative that it was because she was a woman or even because she was a woman of colour. I'm not saying that that didn't play into it. But I don't think that's the primary reason we can give for Trump winning. I think it was a positive victory, not a negative one. And I think the last two victories were negative victories in the sense they've been a vote against someone. This one was absolutely a vote for Trump.
Trump was also talking about things that the left just hasn't been able to deal with properly such as immigration. They left it too late. There has been a massive spike in illegal immigration into the U.S. You need to address the issue. The Democrats didn’t do that quickly enough. They're too queasy to address it because the left of their party doesn't want them to talk about it. And many people just don't believe what the left says anymore, because it has done a lot of gaslighting. One of those was the idea that Joe Biden was healthy and young enough to serve another four years starting in January. We could see that he wasn't. And they lied, he lied. Everyone around him lied.
Whether this is true or not, people believe that Trump says what he thinks. That is huge. People talk about that all the time. Trump fans talk about this all the time. People don't believe that Kamala Harris or Joe Biden are going to say what they think. That’s a key thing.
Trump is also great at having a sense of the zeitgeist. He’s good at getting with the spirit of the times and he did that this time by going on podcasts and turning up at the Bitcoin conference. He’s good at getting with the vibe. And people kept talking about it being a vibes election in the context of Kamala and the Brat Summer, but it was him who was getting the vibes. It was Trump who was capturing the vibes. Kamala was capturing a certain vibe of course, a certain demographic, but he was capturing this other vibe that wasn't really being written about because it wasn't the people who were writing the articles whose vibe he was capturing.
Joanna: One of the overarching themes of your column is the value of things and what this means in reality, such as the disconnection between an asset price and what it’s real, tangible value is worth. How is this impacting our perception of value, worth and wealth and how we feel about it?
Jemima: Since the late 1980s there has been a move towards the hyper-financialization of everything and that all exploded in quite spectacular fashion with the 2008 financial crisis. But rather than that driving us away from it, it feels like we've doubled down on it, with crypto being the manifestation of the hyper financialization of everything because it’s the embodiment of the idea that the only point of finance is to make money, the idea that making money is a valuable pursuit in and of itself without creating any other value. Whereas the idea of the financial industry was not to make money for itself, it was to enable the rest of society to be able to exist and to loan us money for the effective use of capital to be deployed, etc.
We've got to a place where everything has become so hyper-financialized that a lot of people can't see the difference between a cryptocurrency which has no inherent value and a stock which is literally a share, a unit in a company, that is producing a service or a good which is supposedly something that we should value.
It's also symptomatic of financial nihilism, which is where nothing really matters and it's all just a joke. I think this is ultimately connected to the decline of religion, just as so many things are, and that this is created in the void where religion used to be. You need other things to believe in, and one of them is this crazy thing called crypto that just makes you loads of money. And so now the God being worshipped is obviously money. There doesn't seem to me enough of a pushback against this idea, which I find quite grotesque.
Joanna: Looking back over last year, which topic or news item do you think best encapsulates 2024? If you could sum up 2024 in three words, what words would you choose?
Jemima: Trump winning sums up 2024. And also Biden having to quickly step down after the debate. Maybe the debate is the thing that encapsulates 2024 because it was the exposing of the lie that had been pushed.
The words I would choose are vibes, hubris and reckoning, in that order. I feel that Trump’s victory was a real reckoning in 2024.
The hubris was encapsulated by the morning after the election results came through. It's a phrase that's been repeated a lot about Kamala Harris: it was said that she had run a “flawless campaign”. There are so many problems with calling it flawless, including the hubris after she loses to then still be calling it flawless. But people don't want their leaders to be flawless. None of us are flawless. Trump did a really good job of jumping onto that idea, being an anti-hero. He never presented himself as virtuous or as flawless and therefore there was never any veil that had to come off because we always knew what we were seeing and that's quite powerful.
When I was on Bluesky the day of the election and people were talking about how good it was looking for Kamala Harris, it all felt so hubristic. Bluesky has exacerbated this because there’s been a massive exodus this year from X to Bluesky from the left. And I've written about this and got the closest I’ve ever got to being “cancelled” for saying it, but Bluesky is a massive echo chamber and that really exacerbates the hubris and the inability to see what's really going on. Because X is so toxic right now, we've lost a place where you can see the reality. I think there’s going to be a recession from some of the more extreme “woke” ideology that was being pushed onto people, and there's going to be a re-evaluation of how progress should be achieved. That's why I use the word reckoning because the “woke” project has failed in many ways, and it is now time for a new approach.