SUNDAY SCARIES: 25 Things I Am Excited to Leave in 2025

As the year is at a close, it's time to say goodbye to the many things that we hope won't follow us into 2026.

25 Things I Am Excited to Leave in 2025

1. Sydney Sweeney's body being debated by men on CNBC.

2. The Diddy trial as a collective moral Rorschach test we clearly failed.

3. The TikTok ban that became a year-long cosplay of consequences.

4. Meta “accidentally” turning older users' private AI chats into public content.

5. Gap's AI chatbot recommending wide-leg jeans, vibrators, and fascism.

6. The phrase, “AI will replace creatives,” written by people who use Grammarly for their personal emails.

7. Consulting firms freezing salaries while publishing 60-slide decks about “AI-led growth.”

8. Zuckerberg admitting they made $16 Billion from ads stealing from consumers and marketers responding by signing up for Meta Advantage+.

9. Instagram rewriting creators' captions for SEO without telling them.

10. Dating apps using AI to fix the loneliness they industrialized, monetized, and A/B tested.

11. Burnout being framed as a personal problem instead of a system failure.

12. “Company culture” that lives exclusively in a Slack channel no one opens.

13. Rebrands whose primary strategic foundation is justifying a leadership reshuffle.

14. Gen Z being blamed for systems they didn't design, vote for, or profit from.

15. LinkedIn “hot takes” that are actually just humble brags.

16. Holding companies erasing many of the most inspiring legacies of this industry and then acting confused people are upset.

17. Creatives that spend more time lamenting the state of the industry than creating.

18. McDonald's pulling an AI holiday ad before the internet understood the concept.

19. Labubu turning grown adults into feral Beanie Baby day traders.

20. Taylor Swift finding a way to also win the Super Bowl.

21. ICE-themed nativity scenes being the clearest moral messaging of the year.

22. Pinterest Predicts being more emotionally accurate than most government forecasting.

23. Hollywood announcing the Oscars are going to YouTube as though they had a choice.

24. 6-7

25. Pretending 2025 didn't change us for good.

This Year's Red Thread: 2025 Was the Year We Saw Clearly

This was a hard year for many more reasons than the ones I listed. But, it was also clarifying.

This was the year the euphemisms failed and the narratives no longer described the situations unfolding. The curtain was unceremoniously pulled back to reveal some pretty blunt truths and motivations that would have given even the robber barons pause. Sometimes it felt brutal. Other times, it was a retailer chatbot suggesting racism to pair with your resin wash bootcut jeans.

Nothing required deep investigation. The masks all came off on their own.

The non-existent TikTok ban showed how performative power has become. AI didn't replace creativity — it exposed who never respected it. (And who ALWAYS has used em-dashes.) Loneliness was monetized and A/B tested. And the Meta empire continued to show everyone exactly what they care about.

But the people noticed. Americans clocked the hypocrisy. We all got a bit faster at calling bullshit and better at choosing quality over cacophony.

And in the middle of all this, The Nuance Collective was created — not to join the party or try to explain the noise — but to strip away all the bullshit and find the clearest signals of brand and culture.

TNC speeds up the slow things, so we can slow down the things that matter enough to restore judgment, taste, and clarity; to elevate the things that the platforms and systems optimized out.

That's why this year was still pretty special. It provided the right environment for our band of misfits to rise up and start making a difference.

And next year it's on all of us to take more actions to speak up in our own way. It's about raising standards and not cynicism. It's about deciding what we're no longer willing to normalize. It's about choosing coherence we can feel over chaos others can spin.

And for TNC, it's about humanity over optimization theater with the clients and partners who make it so worthwhile.

I am an optimistic person by nature. And I truly believe 2026 will be better than 2025. But it's something we all work at together.

— Nick