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Hi, everybody.

Welcome back to the Be There in Five podcast.

I'm Kate Kennedy, your host.

It is Saturday, December 20th. And I've tried,

I've tried like different episodes for this week and can't quite figure it out. And I keep trying to

recap 2025 or like talk about the year collectively because sometimes it's nice to do like a capstone reflection.

I mean, this is a show about culture after all. But like I'm finding, I don't, everything I listen

back to, I'm like, holy deadpan Eeyore. Like, hello, Holly, it's Jolly. Are you there? Like,

don't people want to be uplifted? I just, I think the 2025 for me was just like, it was tough politically. Understatement of a century. It was a fire hose of worst case scenarios in like current events, it's hard to disseminate. Like,

are things getting materially worse or is the pace and, you know, volume of news we're getting

accelerating and excessive relative to what we're meant to process? And it's a bit of both,

I think. And then that's not even my scope of work. Pop culturally,

I'm like, what can we reflect on? It's like, I don't know, a jet two holiday? Like, each microtrend's

more forgettable than the last. And I think some things are going to be memorable, others not.

But I do think year over year when I sit down to do this, I realize that things are

less and less memorable as time goes on. And culture produces so many moments. But yeah, do they hold

memory? Do they have staying power? Do the youths of today who will write their one in the

millennials of tomorrow have the cultural cohesion where things stick around enough for long enough or the brain experiences enough

repetition to form a memory. And like, I don't know. And I think when I ask myself questions

about how we consume culture, I start to kind of spiral out about like, well, there's part of it where, yes, that's true, but also I'm getting older. And I'm not at the epicenter of what's generating culture. I'm a bit on the outskirts. So I'm kind of playing catch-ups sometimes. And I really feel strongly about not being one of those people that's like, I'm too old to understand it. Because you're not, you're not. If you're on the front lines of fifth grade, you could understand six, seven.

But why would we feel bad about being on the outside of an inside joke? It's not meant for us.

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