What I got wrong in 2024....

My predictions for 2025.....

Welcome to Dr Eliza Filby’s Newsletter,

This community is 6.5k strong…. stay here to discover the shifts that are defining our lives that frankly we should talk more about. Do check out my website for my corporate content and courses. You can also follow me on Instagram.

In this week’s edition:

• Who could have predicted Brat Summer, but what else did I get wrong about 2024?!
• My predictions for 2025
• My year of No! (…..and yes!)
• My ONE rule for avoiding intergenerational conflict at Christmas

Every year I predict for the year ahead. This week I’m revisiting what I wrote 12 months ago, because we all should hold ourselves to account!

So last year I wrote that these three things would define 2024:

1. Will Gen Alpha please stand up? the oldest among Generation Alpha (2010-2025) are hitting their teenage years. Watch them burst out of their algo-silos to mock Gen Z, reject their millennial parents and re-cast the world in their image in 2024. And see a moral panic emerge about their attention spans, tech dependency, future prospects, and how they’ve been parented.

This has not happened as much as I thought it would; Gen Alpha haven’t had their Greta Thunberg moment. I am however getting more and more questions about generation alpha in projects, at events and doing more research on this generation. I was however right about the moral panic by the parents of this generation: Jonathan Haidt’s book Anxious Generation has been a publishing phenomenon this year, as was the recent Channel 4 show Swiped about banning smartphones. There’s a parental and governmental movement emerging - see Australia’s new curbing of social media for teenagers.

1. Nothing is true. AI-generated video will pose a challenge to the creator economy and of course politics but will also begin to infiltrate the workplace.

Again, this has not happened to the same degree I thought it would (hey, change happens slowly). Our workplaces are however becoming more political (due to global events), and they are also becoming more conspiratorial especially when it comes to pay transparency and layoffs. We have seen what distrust has done to politics; do we really want this culture in our workplaces? AI deepfakes will start to infiltrate our workplaces for sure.

1. Side Hustled? Since January 1st in the UK, sites such as Depop and eBay have been legally obliged to report any significant transactions. Selling stuff tax-free, especially on TikTok shop, has been one of the major ways that young people have been able to navigate inflation and amass a bit of financial independence. But the bigger story here of course is the mindset shift evident amongst younger generations who now naturally think beyond the one salary model, laud passive income and multiple streams of revenue.

Again, this is true but I remain constantly surprised by how few employers realise the fact that many of their employees have more than one income stream. In an age where wages have stalled and the expensive stuff in life has gone up, people are now wired to hustle. Invariably employers are from an older generation and hold on to a perception that any young employee should be grateful for a job or a chance. They have very little understanding of how expensive it is to be young these days.

But the broader trend I should have pointed to is the influence of parents and the continual financial reliance younger adults have on their families (both parents and now increasingly grandparents). How many of your friends or colleagues have their parents paying their rent, or are still living in their teenage bedroom or whose parents are helping with the mortgage or childcare? I wrote a book on this…..

My predictions for 2025

Geo-political shifts will be the major show in town, but maybe also…..

1. Co-pilot or AI-captain? Co-pilot or AI-captain? I’ve written about the secret use of Gen AI before, but we will see the shift from covert use—quietly done on phones or non-work laptops—to overt, accepted integration in professional contexts. What once felt like a shortcut will become normalized, particularly in writing, summarizing, structuring and idea generation. AI's outputs will increasingly feel harder to challenge, or perhaps more crucially, less and less time will be allowed for such challenge. What is now labelled as AI hacks will soon become normal workflows. It will become something your clients or new employees will expect either to reduce costs or grunt work. Our prompting and Gen AI conversational mode will become normal and impact how we prompt and converse with actual humans. This increasing dependence will also disrupt how we perceive time and productivity; we may actually underestimate how long tasks actually take when they require critical thinking or human judgment. Like Google before it, generative AI will embed itself into our cognitive processes, streamlining work while subtly reshaping our abilities and expectations.
2. The Right Swipe? Andrew Tate was always a symptom, not a cause. Gen Z were never a bunch of Greta Thunbergs. But we are seeing the rise of a new counter-culture and ‘right swipe’ amongst Gen Z. They are much more conservative than millennials were and are. We're seeing this play out in elections but also culture more broadly. TikTok skits that mock progressive norms and campus culture, the rise of trad wives challenging millennial feminist ideals, the manosphere, the faint religious revival and nostalgic aesthetics. Where this rightward shift is most pronounced is in economics; from Gen Z’s financial scepticism around work to distrust in government intervention to their belief in entrepreneurialism and more pragmatic environmentalism. Does this mean that the naive idealism of the 2010s is giving way to the realism of the 2020s? And how will this be impacted by increasing nationalism and realpolitik in global affairs?
3. The new hierarchy and the AI-enabled upstarts. By 2025, the media hierarchy will undergo another dramatic shift. Digital culture’s once-disruptive stars, like MrBeast and the new podcasting talent, will increasingly resemble the old media they once challenged—mainstream, formulaic, super-sponsored, and centred on mega-talent (but without the regulation!). The grassroots energy that defined the pandemic era has already given way to a landscape dominated by professionalized formats and polished production. However, a new wave of AI-enabled creators will emerge, leveraging advanced graphics, visuals, and editing tools to lower the barriers to entry. These upstarts won’t need massive budgets or legacy star power; they’ll build niche, hyper-personalized content at scale, redefining creativity and competition in the digital space.

My year of No! (and yes!)

This year I published a book and, as fun as it was, I shall not be writing another one soon. Instead, in January we are going into production for a regular show that I am launching on YouTube called It’s All Relative examining the key shifts that are shaping our world. Launch date is early Spring.

2025 will also see the audiobook and a revised paperback of Inheritocracy published. To coincide with publication, I shall be doing a book tour in Australia in May and in the US in the Autumn. There is another top-secret piece of news that I can’t yet share, but that I’m super excited about…. More soon!

My social media team tells me that my content has reached millions of people this year across four different continents, which is frankly mind-boggling. If you are interested in sponsoring my content, brand partnerships, or finding out more about our reach, do get in contact with Harriet on our team.

How to navigate multi-generational chat at Christmas

I mean, you can’t. My best suggestion is to maybe run away into another room and watch either:

Industry Series 1-3. Forget the sex, cocaine and dodgy trading, what really thrills is the richly-written characters. It's one of the very few shows I’ve seen where the female characters are as complex as the male ones and where women are not just a plot device for either male heroism or dysfunction.

Lucan on BBC iPlayer, a true-crime three parter that manages to stay on the right side of exploitation and intrigue. It is also a fascinating portrait of the relationship between journalist and victim; both searching for the truth but with different means of achieving it.

Merry Christmas and thank you for taking the time to read, watch and engage with my content this year,

Best wishes to you and yours

Eliza