Singing from the same hymn sheet
My 2025 trend predictions
Really Good Tomatoes asks irreverent questions and offers hopeful answers. It’s a newsletter about culture, behaviour, food, art, relationships, pleasure, politics, work, environment, identity, and society. For people who refuse to be fobbed off with crap tomatoes.
Singing from the same hymn sheet
My, Substack, how you’ve grown! In the last couple of years, the platform has had its nose to the digital grindstone, adding new features, over-complicating its microblogging function, and, most notably, onboarding the entire internet. As a result, the algorithm is working hard. Sometimes this is good. I recently posted in Notes that I’d love to find more people writing about sewing and since then I have indeed found several newsletters catering to my specific interests. But sometimes it’s unnerving. No sooner have I sent out a newsletter about my commitment to having fun, no matter what, than I start to see articles popping up in my feed that echo, build on, or come at this topic from a different (or, to my horror, better) angle. Pretty soon you start to wonder… are we all writing about the same things?
The short answer, of course, is yes. There is nothing new under the sun so it’s silly to imagine there would be on Substack? Also, the vast majority of people writing on Substack are (double horror!) a bit like me. They are Gen Xs and millennials and Gen Zs living under capitalism, in a time of unprecedented technological advancement*, terrifying political prospects, and the inexorable rise of orange wine.
Striving for originality is a fool’s errand, and if that’s my goal, I may as well go back to bed. This scenario is not without its appeal but unfortunately my brain is ungovernable and instead of going “Ah, fuck it,” like a person who values their sanity and their peace, I go “Oh, interesting! What does this tell us about our culture right now?”
And so, based on what I’m seeing, hearing, reading and talking A LOT about, I’ve tried to pinpoint a few things I think are going on, culturally, in 2025. You can call them trend predictions if you like. I realise it’s traditional to release trend predictions at the start of the calendar year, or even at the end of the previous calendar year, but as you know, I believe in soft-launching the new year and so, for me, February is the perfect time to actually start thinking about what’s up.
As always, I really welcome your thoughts. What are you seeing, hearing, reading and talking A LOT about? Where do you think we’re going in 2025, and would you like to read about it here in Really Good Tomatoes? Reply to this email, comment below, or come and find me in Notes to chat about it.
*Arguably everyone who has ever existed has done so in a time of unprecedented technological advancement because that’s literally what technological advancement is but it sounded dramatic so I kept it in.
My 2025 trend predictions
OK first up my absolute number one trend prediction for 2025 is saunas. I promise this is not just wishful thinking. Sauna culture has been quietly steaming away for a few years now, with new pop-ups and destinations slowly appearing. The Observer covered the burgeoning trend last year and Vogue picked it up last month. It makes sense right? Having leapt maniacally, into wild swimming, we now need somewhere to warm up. Moreover, we’ve done the extreme cold thing (Oh, how your troubles melt away as you lose sensation in your toes and your brain, completely fucking thrown by this behaviour, asks you if you’re sure your skin might not actually be… on fire?!) heat was the obvious next step.
But wait… what if… we could combine both? Lol, babe, we totally can.
No surprises, then, to learn that there’s a sauna on the beach at Margate, at Folkestone, at Whitstable, at Eastbourne. My beloved Hastings has a sauna on the pier. Between Brighton and Littlehampton there are at least eight seaside saunas. They’re in Cornwall, Norfolk, Pembrokeshire, Fife. Honestly you’d be hard pressed to find a UK holiday destination without one.
Meanwhile, the non-profit Community Sauna Baths opened in London’s Hackney Wick in 2021 and as of spring 2025 there will be six community saunas across different parts of London. And when I say “community sauna” this is not your local leisure centre. These facilities are cool. Think wooden barrel-style huts and tin baths for cold plunges. There is a vibe to these saunas that reminds me more than anything of the speakeasy trend of the early 2010s. Which is to say, right now they feel sort of secret and anti-establishment, but I’ve got a feeling they’re about to be absolutely fucking everywhere. And pretty soon, the stag and hen parties will move in, the corporate wellness days will book them out, and they will cost £58 a session. My tip to keep it punk: build your own.
(Only slightly joking, when I was in Hastings last Easter I got chatting to the guy at Samphire Saunas and he said “you could totally do it yourself, you just need a second-hand horsebox” and I spent a really good chunk of the next few weeks looking at horseboxes on eBay before finally admitting to myself that this particular project might be beyond me. But note that I said “might be” I still haven’t entirely given up on this dream so… watch this space!)
I’ve written about the rise of friendship discourse before and I don’t see it losing pace any time soon. I think all of us are feeling the effects of disconnection, fuelled in no small part by our phones as discussed in new book, Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart, which is definitely on my 2025 reading list. But I will fully admit this one is also personal. I have been pondering the challenges of “friendship under capitalism” for a long time now, probably since the pandemic. Not just because we were all separated from each other during lockdown but because it ensconced us in our own immediate experience. As we habituated to being alone with our feelings, we became solipsistic.
When writer and relationships coach Melissa A. Fabello posted her infamous “at capacity” text template in 2019 people were horrified, but less than a year later it had become completely acceptable for people to say “I just can’t right now” and for you to have to just… be okay with that.
Shortly after the pandemic, I got pregnant with my second child and that transition also challenged a lot of what I thought I believed about friendship. I don’t normally click on “Things I wasn’t ready to hear before I had kids” type articles but this one lured me in, and among the things listed was the line, “Mothers remember and hold onto how they were treated by friends and relatives during pregnancy and postpartum time, for better or worse.”
Finally, of course, I’m currently trying to break up with my phone and in doing so, confronting what that will mean for my friendships.
As a millennial mum, my friendship dilemmas will be different from those of a young person just starting uni, or an older Gen Xer without kids. But I think there are similarities to the challenges we’re facing because even though our life stages and experiences may be vastly different, we are still all affected by the same social, cultural, political forces. And a lot of what I’m seeing people writing about could broadly be summed up by the following question: Where are our friends? But, equally, where are we, when our friends need us?
It simply isn’t okay to “not have capacity” for people when we are all so intrinsically reliant on love, on support, on connection, on comfort. And I think that’s where we are heading now, culturally. I’m seeing people start to examine that, not in a backlash-y way, but in a How can we do this better? way. So yeah, I foresee a lot more energy dedicated to this subject from all quarters, including this one. I’ve already made a start with newsletters on taking a more radical approach to intimacy (including platonic), why I won’t fuck my friends (but you’re very welcome to fuck yours), and why we need to party more.
Following on from friendship, I think we’re going to see a lot more focus on fostering offline connection and building tangible communities. Connection is the thread on which both friendship and community hang, but I’ve listed it here because the sense of connection we get from having a strong community is distinct from the intimacy of friendship. Think solidarity and camaraderie, rather than love and emotional security. There’s no hierarchy here; actually, we need all of them. But friendship and community are different, as Katherine Goldstein from The Double Shift outlines here, and so I have kept them separate in this list.
In terms of the direction this trend will take, I think it’ll be a mix. There are definitely a lot of people just starting to see and understand what lack of community is doing to them (certainly, anyone who has kids will have had a big fucking epiphany about it) and I think we’ll continue to see a lot of angry think-pieces about this. I don’t necessarily mind this. I see it as an important stage of the journey. I still feel like writing angry think-pieces about it too sometimes but I’m trying to channel my energy into something more constructive and I am witnessing a lot of other people do this too. In 2025 I think we will start to move away from broad brushstrokes and blanket statements about what community is or should be and stupid quick-fix, paint-by-numbers “how to” type content, towards a more unvarnished and more personalised understanding of what community could look like, and how it might actually already exist, and why, perhaps, we’re overlooking it. “Think smaller,” should be the motto here.
When I asked over on Bluesky where people saw the conversation going over the next 11 months, one follower replied: “I'd like to see the discourse shift from bemoaning big, failed systems towards celebrating personal, community-centred ones.” I agree. And I think we may see a shift from people complaining about the erosion of it, to being a bit more proactive, open-minded, and hopeful about it.
Again, it’s not just me! I wrote last week about how I’m breaking up with my phone and, naturally, I was then inundated with more examples of people having this conversation with themselves, but this is more than just confirmation bias. As I said in the piece, I think there’s some real substance to this vibe shift that differentiates it from previous chatter. I think we are starting to unpick the more pernicious effects of being glued to our phones, from collapsing attention spans, to undermining relationships, and feeling chronically unsexy. I think we are starting to really confront the power this stupid little box has over us and at what cost. We are realising the choice to be online all the goddamn time wasn't one we actually recall making, and deciding that the supposed inevitability of being constantly online is something to question, protest, rebel against. This is no longer a *shrugs* situation. The fact that it feels impossible to not be online is seriously not okay.
There are no less than three books out this month which speak directly to this and address the desire, the urgent need, to log off. And it’s not just hand-wringing elders feeling this way. I’m seeing so many younger writers who are angry – and are encouraging their peers to get angry – about the life, the experiences, they feel we (society) have allowed uncontested smartphone ubiquity to rob them of. And I recently read about this Gen Z-led five step programme which aims to help young people get off social media and break up with their smartphones.
Even if we don’t, or are not looking to, quit the internet entirely, I think a lot of us are moving away from anxious ambivalence towards a different kind of feeling. Something more akin to indignation. And we’re starting to take action. So I expect to see a lot more on this subject over the next eleven months.
On a recent episode of Mag Hags podcast, Lucy and I discussed the decline of quality in fashion. We were looking at a 1992 issue of Cosmopolitan which featured a fashion editorial on where to buy leather trousers and what to look for. Evergreen content. But what really caught our eye were the prices for some of these trousers. A pair from Next, for example, were listed at £175, a price that looked worryingly similar to what you’d expect from the same store in 2025. And I don’t mean once you’ve adjusted for inflation (£175 in 1992 is about £465 in today’s money), I mean, you would literally see those same numbers on the price tag.
“I can’t imagine you’d pay more than £175 today,” I said on the show. “I can’t imagine you’d pay as much as that,” countered Lucy, and she was dead right. A quick google shows that you can buy a pair of “premium” leather trousers in Next for £165. Good grief.
Of course, people in both the fashion industry and sustainability have long been talking about the decline in garment quality (and with it, ethics). Fast fashion is a huge social, political, and environmental problem and I think conversations around it have been steadily gathering pace over the last few years. But reduced quality is not limited to clothing, and it does not always lead to reduced prices.
As
lays out brilliantly in this essay, the last couple of decades have seen standards dropping in “all the areas that make life worth living: entertainment, books, music, restaurants. Even things like furniture, architecture, and services like airline travel have gone downhill in the last two decades.”“I’m old enough to remember when airlines used to provide a hot meal on a domestic cross-country flight. Now they throw a single 70-calorie bag of Sunchips at you and expect your serf-like gratitude. Room & Board will gladly charge you nearly $4,000 for a wood veneer credenza. You almost have to admire the audacity.”
These are the kinds of stories I’m hearing everywhere. “Can you believe X cost this much?” is such a familiar refrain that I have no choice but to start responding, simply, “yes.” Because I do believe it. I know it. And, no, you’re right, it’s not bloody worth it. Fast fashion is actually something of an outlier in this respect. In most cases, we’re now paying more, for less.
“Seven quid for a pint!” I heard someone exclaim just last night. What they didn’t say is that that beer is already less good than it was ten years ago. Europe has already seen a reduction in yield and a diminishment in quality of hops, thanks to climate change.
Ironically, the quest for more eco-friendly options has, in some cases, led indirectly to things getting shitter. This wonderful exploration of why indoor lighting is terrible now, highlights (lol sorry) how positive progress doesn’t always lead to better experiences.
So while I do think sustainability is slowly making its way into people’s day to day consumer choices, I don’t think it’s climate concern that’s driving this trend, or not entirely. I think, at the heart of it, people feel cheated, not just financially, but spiritually. We don’t want ersatz tomatoes, we want the real thing. And I think I am going to be far from the only one exploring that this year.
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Don’t worry, it’s not what it sounds like. I’m not about to get all “masculine energy” up in here (although I am not adverse to masculine energy, I just think there’s a time and a place for it, and also my definition of “masculine” probably isn’t the same as Mark Zuckerberg’s).
I think what people are doing is examining some of the “truths” that have been laid out for them over the past five to ten years and wondering if it’s quite as straightforward as that. I don’t even need to know what “truths” they have in mind to know that… it almost certainly isn’t.
But mostly I think this trend is born out of the fact that people are starting to realise how much energy they are giving over to proving their wokeness which could be used on *actually making the world a better place.*
I also think this is linked to us redefining our relationship with the internet. Too much time online leads to over-cautiousness and self-censorship. It leads to people incorporating leaden disclaimers about privilege into their work. It leads to over-explaining and virtue-signalling. It’s patronising and, more importantly, it’s boring. To be clear, I don’t think we’re going backwards. I think we’re evolving. I think we’re moving towards a world in which we show, don’t tell.
However. It’s important to acknowledge the fact that we are living through a resurgence of far right politics and there are literal attempts being made to roll back progress. It seems unlikely to me that the companies ditching their hiring quotas and scaling back DEI policies are doing so because there are better, more efficient ways to enact positive change (although I would entertain the argument that there are) but rather because Trump’s ascendance has finally given them the green light to stop faking it. But I think this FT essay makes an interesting point when it observes that “woke” has been co-opted by the right and thus has become useless to progressives. We need to unhitch ourselves from it. If we want to protect the progress we’ve made and even build on it, we have to divest from this binary and start thinking, writing, talking, campaigning, and taking action in more nuanced ways. And I believe we are more than capable of that.
As a person who has been on Substack for 5 years now (woah, what?!!) it’s been curious to observe its rise. The last year has seen a huge surge in writers and, increasingly, other kinds of content creators, migrating to or setting themselves up on Substack. Some have joined after deleting their X accounts. Others, like me, have grown tired of microposting and decided to go all in with newsletters. While Substack does facilitate audio, and is desperately pushing itself as a video platform, I would say that the majority of users at this point in 2025, are here because they are writers. Indeed, many of us are here precisely because we do not want to make video. In 2020 I was one of only a handful of people I knew with a newsletter. Now, everyone has one. And everyone who doesn’t is wondering if they should start one. That’s some outreach. And, as much as I personally do not want to make or watch videos, I don’t doubt that Substack will make itself a home for video (if not the home). It will be interesting to see how the ecosystem evolves.
However, all this growth, all this promise, all this potential comes with questions, many of which I myself have grappled with. How do I make this work for me? And when people have questions, you can be damn sure there’s an emerging market for answers. The answers don’t even have to be true, or realistic. Pile ‘em high and sell ‘em cheap (for £4 a month).
Sure enough, the “how to Substack” machine has grunted its way up a few gears and in addition to more vaunted success stories, I think we are going to see a whooooollllllleeeeee lot more content along the lines of How I Make £100,000 A Year On Substack, Five Successful Substack Writers Share Their Writing Tips, and 7 Things Bestselling Substack Writers Do Differently.
That latter one is real, it is exactly as awful as it sounds ["’Every piece of content should have multiple lives,’ explained a Bestseller who generates $10K monthly. ‘I can turn one great post into five different products.’”] and there will be a lot more like it. You have been warned.
Let’s end on an optimistic note because I am genuinely so inspired by a lot of what I see on here, even if it shatters my illusion of being a free-thinker. I think there’s a lot of fun to be had on Substack if we can divest from the rise and grind of it and treat it more like the blogosphere of old. For example, since I let the algorithm know I’m looking for fellow sewists, I’ve found so many fabulous newsletters covering precisely the kind of content I was looking for (dressmaking, tailoring and pattern drafting, with an eye on sustainability). And I think there are a lot of people doing cool stuff with illustration and graphic design on here, such as the artist I shared in last week’s letter. I’m also obsessed with the people making digital zines on Substack, such as these stunning ones from
.
The simplicity of Substack is undeniably a big draw (see above re. not wanting to make video), but I can’t pretend I wouldn’t love Really Good Tomatoes to have more art direction. There are also a lot of people using Substack to talk about the joy of physical publications and as both a writer AND producer of a podcast about vintage magazines, this is obviously an area I’m interested in. Both types are handily rounded up in
.And I’m loving seeing people having fun with their area of expertise. The joy of Substack to me, both as a writer and a reader, is not in its polish, but in the space it provides for us to be a bit raw, a bit edgy, a bit playful. If I wanted to read a reported feature about colour theory, I’d go to Dezeen. On Substack, I can’t get enough of Kayla Roolaart’s whimsical mashup of food expertise and interior design chops in
.
Describing subcultures as a trend sounds oxymoronic but I’m not referring to any specific subculture, I’m thinking more about the idea of people using Substack to engage more with their niche interests. Admittedly this is a bit of a hopeful one. We all love being part of a subculture until it comes time to pay the bills and we realise we need to offer something we can actually sell. And while we certainly don’t need to strive for universality in order to do that (when you try to appeal to everyone you’ll appeal to no one etc), we probably do need to cultivate something closer to… well, market value. But in the meantime I think we can and should have some fun. It’s an act of resistance, remember?
The list of companies we can no longer patronise grows longer by the day. As AirBnB co-founder Joe Gebbia becomes the latest tech bro to join Elon Musk’s gang of twats, sorry, Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), we must ask ourselves if it is really that surprising to discover that someone who was more than happy to profit from the exacerbation of the housing crisis and the destruction of local communities is evil. Funny isn’t it, how people who start off like “Hey, I’ve got a simple way for us to share resources and make a bit of extra cash” always turn out to be bad eggs.
If, like me, you’ve been trying to wean yourself off AirBnB for years, let this be the death knell. Where will we find our affordable holiday rentals now, Franki? Well, you could always try Vrbo.
