If this week’s trends have a theme, it’s longing. From romantasy to performative reading to the return of 2012, they say a lot about what we’re craving: escape, identity, and hope.

To get real nerdy about it, in terms of developmental psychology, you could call it Sehnsucht. “Life longings (Sehnsucht) – defined as intense desires for ideal states of life that are remote or unattainable – reflect individuals’ search for happiness and meaning and their struggle to cope with losses and unrealizable wishes” (Journal of Research in Personality, 2009).

Not exactly uplifting. But there’s hope in that “search for happiness and meaning” bit. As therapists, what are we if not in the business of hope?

With care,
Enid

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The list of 2025’s literary hits tell one story. Romantasy—a fusion of romance and fantasy featuring magical worlds, slow-burn longing, and high-stakes emotional arcs—has scooped the audiobook charts and even made a dent in more “literary” lists. Readers flock to morally gray characters, magical powers, and in some cases mind-bending world-building. Trigger warnings abound. The genre’s rise reflects a cultural appetite for escape, empowerment, and mythic love in an increasingly un-romantic world.

Romantasy offers yearning, agency, and transformation. It’s all fun and assassin heroines until we look at how men written by women and bookish lust can mask (and fuel) displeasure in real life.

Tropes, immortality, and magical powers can reveal desires that feel unattainable or taboo in real life.

A recent New Yorker opinion piece highlights the rise of “performative reading”—publicly displaying intellectualism through curated book stacks, subway posing, or TikTok “reading aesthetics.” While I’d argue this isn’t new, it does piggy-back on a more novel label trending this year. Enter the “performative male” discourse, in which men telegraph depth or sensitivity via carefully-staged habits. Matcha anyone?

Performance can be a defense for insecurity—an identity built for external consumption more than internal coherence. Therapy is the perfect space to explore the blurry lines between perception, self, and desires.

The internet invites, amplifies, and then ridicules performative actions. In therapy, we get to be remove the judgement and mine the performance for meaning instead.

In a rare moment when Gen Z and Millennials appreciate the same thing, a wave of nostalgia is sweeping social media centered on the “2012 era” and “Millennial Optimism.” Think: early days of Instagram, Barack Obama as president, hipster coffee culture is burgeoning, everyone’s learning the Napoleon Dynamite dance, and recession pop is playing in the club. Suddenly what was “cringe” is being idolized; Gen Z is jealous and Millennials are enjoying memory lane.

Underneath the grainy videos and One Direction songs, there’s a sense of nostalgia for more analog times and grief that we can’t un-ring the bell of a hyper-digitized society. Circa 2012, there was a sense of hope, excitement, and awe for the decentralization of power that social media offered (read this article from 2011 on the “Twitter Revolution”). What we’re seeing now is, increasingly, a sense of hopelessness instead.

The 2012 revival isn’t about skinny jeans or teal Tumblr filters—it’s about longing for hope. This trend shows a collective grief for the loss of a cultural mood where possibility felt accessible.

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