Being Pretentious Is IN For 2025

Nostalgia and SATC and The Odyssey and HBO's Girls oh my

I’ve heard it said before that I’m pretentious. My first recollection of this dates back to high school: 2015, if I had to put a date on it. My dear friend Crissy, in the midst of what remains our only actual fight in a decade of friendship, lobbed the accusation at me. I can’t even remember what the rest of the argument was about — but I remember being called pretentious. I clutched my pearls over it for days; lamenting to my mother as she did dishes, seeking solace from other friends who surely didn’t believe that I could be pretentious. None of them gave quite the emphatic support I was seeking. By the end of the week I had come to terms with my diagnosis, and Crissy and I were friends again. Recently on Xwitter a meme was being passed around — a photograph with text across it that read, “That one friend who’s too pretentious,” with a prompt that asked users to share their most pretentious opinion.

“Every time I see one of those I think of you…in the best way possible.” remarked my coworker Kyra one day in the office.

Apparently, old habits die hard.

The ringing in of the New Year drags introspection out of us. It strong-arms us into laying bare those parts of our person we want to discard, and those we wish to carry over into the next 365 days. I’ve thought long and hard about this, and come to the only possible conclusion: pretentiousness is IN for 2025. I can’t deny who I am at my core, and there have been a number of catalysts for my latest episode — nostalgia, HBO’s Girls, and The Odyssey.

Girls was the tip of the iceberg. I had never watched it before last year. As someone who moved to New York for college in 2017, I felt I was just barely too young for it to have clicked with me while it was airing. But a cocktail of the right circumstances (being 25, living in Brooklyn, too much reflection on Obama era America) finally led me to Lena Dunham’s shores. I simultaneously wanted to stay forever, and wished I had never seen it. Equal parts comfort and disdain settled in my soul as I realized that I knew all of these characters, and that some of the experiences I was watching were ones I had either had or witnessed friends have. It was brilliant. It also pushed me to take the plunge into what I felt was even deeper forbidden territory — Sex and The City.

Being a young woman in New York who has never watched Sex and The City feels blasphemous. Every day starts with a prayer that no one brings it up so I don’t have to admit I don’t actually know why Big is moving to Paris. Needless to say, I’m devouring it now. But the other day, there was an incident. As I was watching Sarah Jessica Parker make insane facial expressions during elongated pauses, I couldn’t help but wonder, is intellectualism dead? Listen, I know it’s a big jump to go from watching Charlotte become a drag king to wondering if society is capable of thinking for themselves anymore, but I promise I have a through line here.

SATC and Girls are often thrown in the same box; they’re both shows about the lives of four women navigating their relationships, their careers, and themselves. One show helped shape the 2000’s, and the other helped shape the 2010’s, and lately, my generation of mid-20’s women has been aimlessly searching for the next friend group to guide us through the 2020’s and assign our personalities to (I’m worried I’m a Miranda and a Hannah for those curious). The most likely candidate we have is (you guessed it) HBO’s upcoming Untitled Rachel Sennott Project, which will see one of the internet’s darlings writing, executive-producing, and starring in a comedy pilot about the reunion of a codependent friend group. I’ve been a fan of Rachel’s since Shiva Baby, so it’s not that I have a lack of faith in her ability to step up to the task at hand, but I do have troves of questions about what a 2020’s successor to SATC and Girls would look like. Can something like that exist today?

I don’t mean that in the same way that alt-right guys on Xwitter do when they post a clip of Michael Scott from The Office or any random scene from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia with a caption along the lines of “You could never make this today because of woke.” I mean it in a “the digital age has isolated us” and “we’re hooked up to feeding tubes of nostalgia” way. I do also think social media has made us more stupid. Every day is Groundhog Day — I open the app formerly known as Twitter, and see someone quote tweet a clip of iCarly and say “I could write an essay about the sociopolitical implications of Miss Briggs having a Randy Jackson closet.” Okay. Do it then! I’d love to see a well thought out, interesting look at an old television show — in fact, that’s like, my whole thing. Only one condition: no Chat GPT allowed.

I may be more of a Luddite than I previously thought, but social media in the last few years has made thinking for yourself impossible. TikTok, Twitter (I can’t call it X again), Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn probably, have all transformed into an endless conveyor belt of the same nonsense, repeated over and over again. I’ve never had much respect for the industry of “influencing,” and I don’t believe I’ll gain some any time soon.

“You guys HAVE to try this viral dupe of Clinique’s Black Honey it’s 9% off linked in my Amazon storefront if you use my special code DEMUREDUPE at checkout!”

No, actually, I don’t have to do that! Every influencing video I see is the devil speaking through “content creators” who want to sell me nostalgia while speed running anything remotely funny to come out of the internet, just to beat it into its grave at the Cringe Graveyard within a week. We fall into bubbles that never pop, and forget that there’s an entire world out there. Gay Twitter isn’t a reflection of real life. The girlies had a hard pill to swallow in between sweet treats when they realized that Kamala was not in fact Brat. Tate McRae is the new pop music “It” girl because her VMA’s outfit is giving Britney her flowers. It’s not that deep that my favorite movie is Shark Tale because it’s camp, not everything has to be good. Barbenheimer and Glicked are so cool because you can have movies for boys and movies for the girlies :)

So few of these words mean something to people outside of the internet. Gender essentialism is fine as long as it’s soaked in nostalgia and packaged up as healing your inner child. I want to state for the record, I am not immune to these behaviors. Sometimes I too see a TikTok slideshow of “the day before Christmas break in 2005 and you’re in kindergarten” and feel wistful. But there’s a fine line between experiencing nostalgia and confusing nostalgia for meaning. Just because something is old, doesn’t automatically make it classic or timeless, the same way that not all new inventions equate to progress (cybertrucks). Take Chappell Roan for instance — she pays homage to artists she loves, but she is wholly original in both her music and her styling. There’s a reason that all proposed comparisons to other artists have failed in her case. Is she Gaga? No. Is she Madonna? No, that’s not it either. She has clear influences, but she’s a rare case of an artist who is not being sold as the new [INSERT 2000’s POPSTAR HERE].

What I liked about Girls is that it doesn’t dabble in nostalgia, and it doesn’t produce nostalgia either. It’s raw and messy, and a time capsule of a specific moment for a specific culture in a specific place. I don’t look at the characters and wish I were them, I look at them and know them. Part of what makes art beautiful is when the artists are able to display patterns and subcultures right as they’re beginning. There is a time and place to be retrospective; in fact, I do it quite a bit. But nothing will compare to watching a new movie or TV show and having it dawn on you in real time that it’s good, and being able to express why it’s good. Because it IS that deep! I can’t keep subjecting myself to bad movies and TV in the name of it being “camp” or a “cult classic” (both wildly misused phrases in our lexicon today). I watched Supernatural as a teenager (and a little bit as an adult if we’re being honest), and I will spend the rest of my life making up for lost time.

I worry daily about how comfortable we’ve gotten with allowing ourselves to be dumbed down and isolated due to the stronghold social media has on our society. AI is everywhere, online humor is now the same three jokes repeated, we have an eagerness to be alone and cancel plans, use therapized language in place of empathy, a desire for everything to be “comfy” and “cozy.” Learning is beautiful. Discomfort does not necessarily equal harm. Thinking for yourself and sharing your thoughts with others, allowing yourself to look silly or be challenged, is the groundwork for building that community that everyone was talking about in November. Reading books is not an act of privilege and we should all do more of it; you can master all of the aforementioned statements by reading.

I recently took a brief break from social media, and when I went back, imagine my surprise to find that suddenly everyone was fighting about translations of The Odyssey and whether or not you were pretentious to have read it or even know what it was. I felt faint reading thread after thread of people referring to it as a “western classic” or something that was “only taught in America” and that despite all of this, Emily Wilson certainly has the worst version. I have much to thank Christopher Nolan for, but this page in internet history is not one of them. If I’m pretentious because I had to read The Odyssey in high school THEN LOCK ME UP! What really makes me pretentious is that I went to an event where Emily Wilson read from the original Greek poem and I cried. You know The Odyssey, whether you know you do or not. It’s one of the foundational texts in how we create stories today and in centuries past. Episodes of SpongeBob can point back to The Odyssey (which I’m sure excites some of you who can only watch the same two TV programs over and over again).

The death of intellectualism has been occurring rapidly over the last few years. Some of it really is out of our grasp. Education disruptions during the COVID pandemic, right-wing sycophants gutting libraries to win the war on wokeness, corporations eager to fund the shitty nostalgia machine, all have the blood of thought and originality on their hands. But I think in the new year, we should all examine our role as audience members a bit more closely. Why do our kids need iPads? Do I need to see another live-action Disney movie? Why do I so deeply long to emanate a Tumblr Grunge AM by Arctic Monkeys core high schooler in 2014 (you do NOT want this)? Why is it cool when people dive headfirst into conservatism by saying things like the R-word to get a reactionary response or to make themselves seem edgy? Like genuinely why the FUCK are people saying the R-word again, I cannot grasp that one. Read some classic English novels. Read some classic non-English classics. Read some modern non-English and English novels. Read the damn Odyssey. I promise that your tropes and comfort stories will always be there for you to go back to. Read the news, read the weather, read random articles that you find interesting.

Get off your damn phone (unless you’re using it to read this <3).

And just like that, I drew some sort of a through line between Sex and The City and Girls and the death of intellectualism. I knew I’d get there eventually. No photos because I’m in a bad mood. Words only! I hope you all have a happy and healthy 2025. Being pretentious rules.