401. The psychology of microtrends
The Psychology of your 20s
iHeartPodcasts
4.8 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 30 March 2026
⏱️ 47 minutes
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Summary
We all want to feel that we fit into a social group. But how does this play out when it comes to trends? From ‘mob wife energy’ to ‘cottagecore’, rapidly-evolving microtrends put more aesthetic-driven content in front of us than ever before, and it can feel hard to keep up. In this episode, we explore the ways that social media, fast fashion and ‘dopamine culture’ can pressure us to buy, how microtrend fatigue is giving way to a new type of self-expression, and how we can healthily navigate our own consumption of microtrends.
We explore:
- The 5 stages of a trend, and how microtrends are different
- How world events influence microtrends
- Why social contagion, social conformity, and individual expression influence our behaviour
- Why social media and fast fashion have led to an explosion in microtrends
- The role of ‘dopamine culture’ on our brains
- Microtrend fatigue, and how ‘vibes’ might be replacing them
- When to buy, and when to wait
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed human. |
| 0:08.5 | Hello everybody. I'm Jemma Spike and welcome back to the psychology of your 20s, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments and transitions of our 20s and what they mean for our psychology. |
| 0:29.5 | Hello everybody. Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. It is so great to |
| 0:35.1 | have you here back for another episode as we of course break down |
| 0:39.0 | the psychology of our 20s today. After the love and the enthusiasm that I received for our |
| 0:47.0 | psychology of fashion episode and our psychology of personal style episode, so many of you |
| 0:53.0 | demanded an episode specifically on micro trends. So many of you demanded an episode specifically on micro trends. |
| 0:56.1 | So many of you were in my DMs being like, that part of the podcast was great. |
| 1:00.4 | Can you do a full episode on it? And I thought that this week, we would. |
| 1:05.6 | Micro Trends have flooded our feeds recently. I just feel like the internet cannot go more than a few weeks |
| 1:14.1 | without circulating like the new it fashion trend, the new it top, the new it print. And I also |
| 1:20.8 | think nearly every single one of us at some stage has participated. I bought a luboo |
| 1:25.8 | last year. I have to admit it. I currently have a pair of |
| 1:29.4 | office siren glasses that you guys are never going to see that are, they are incredibly |
| 1:34.4 | impractical considering I actually wear glasses and they are so small and they are so tiny and that is a |
| 1:40.7 | discussion for a whole other time. The question really is, despite the fact that we |
| 1:46.8 | know it's marketing, despite the fact that we know these trends aren't going to last more than |
| 1:53.3 | a year, maybe a few months, why do we participate in microtrends? Particularly in our 20s, what is the pool, what is the drive, |
| 2:03.3 | especially when things do tend to be cheap and poorly made and, you know, break after a couple of |
| 2:10.5 | words? Would you believe me if I told you it all came down to human psychology? I think you probably |
| 2:16.8 | would, especially since this is |
| 2:18.7 | a psychology podcast. But microchens, especially, the way they influence human emotion and |
... |
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