Perhaps 2026 will be the Exhaustion Era

screenshot from X attributed to Visual Capitalist

It's been one of the most dramatic half a decade in the history of the human race. Do you remember 2020, the COVID season? We were all stuck inside and couldn't go anywhere. Everybody knew about the pandemic, quarantine, it was all over the news. It felt like the world hit a pause button on everything to give us an opportunity to get back out in it soon. That period lasted for about 2 years.

Then all of a sudden we came to 2022. Everybody's talking about gaslighting. It's a little hysterical because the word gaslighting jumped from its original meaning to basically just meaning lying. Anytime the youth felt someone was going to make them regret what they just said, they immediately counter with "Why are you gaslighting me?"

But the same year also had the emergence of AI. AI was starting to make a lot of people's jobs look irrelevant and they were worried about it. But it's been about 3 years and everybody is still just fine. And with AI booming came two things, people that saw an opportunity to use it for their businesses and people who thought they could use it for deception. I actually thought AI content will be flooding social media and it kind of is but if it's not quality stuff, just read the comments you'll see a lot of "It's AI" or a recent word "AI slop".

When AI started dominating with chatgpt, you could feel it in the air, like something big was coming for us all, but nobody knew what it would be.

Now, fast forward to today, and it's just a bunch of crap and people trying so hard to take money from users who are trying their hands on AI tools. AI content is everywhere, people just throwing it out there because it's not how people describe it, it's how machines describe it. Rage on rage on rage because you're so mad you want to share it with others. Brain rot because you're scrolling through it for too long. The internet has changed, it's a totally different place.

The word authentic also had its time to reign in 2023. Authentic this, authentic that. We keep saying something we make is authentic and the more we say it the less authentic it feels. It's like we're all pretending to be real people making genuine stuff.

But, in 2026, I think you'll start to see that a lot more people are going to take a break from being online as much, not completely, but because they're just tired. I doubt the new generation would though, I'll exclude them from this prediction.

You can tell this when you listen to how people talk about their phones now. There's less excitement and more resentment with the way people are talking about online things. We are tired of fake stuff that looks like real stuff.

We say quality over quantity all the time, and hopefully this time we will actually follow through on it, but only time will tell.