How “crashing out” became the prevalent mood of 2025

Quit your job on a whim by throwing your uniform at your manager after your holiday request was denied? Emergency stopped in traffic to let out a blood-curdling scream behind the wheel because someone pulled out in front of you? Triple-texted your situationship before blocking him and throwing your phone across the room when he took two days to respond to the meme you sent? If any of these scenarios sound familiar to you, you may be engaging in 2025’s hottest trend: crashing out.

Defined by Urban Dictionary as “to go insane and/or do something stupid” and “to lose all your self control”, the phenomenon itself is obviously nothing new. From meltdowns to ‘menty bs’, we’ve been snapping in the face of both minor and major inconveniences since time immemorial. But the term itself is relatively new. Spend any time online and you’ll see young people using the phrase to describe anything from talking themselves down in the work bathroom after an interaction with an annoying customer to losing their shit over having their time wasted by a man they had to force themselves to like in the first place.

Like most slang, the exact origin of the phrase is unknown, but—again, like most contemporary slang—general public opinion points to roots in AAVE (African-American Vernacular English). According to an annual research article studying patterns in American speech, many attribute it to Baton Rouge slang, and Louisiana rapper Youngboy Never Broke Again in particular, although there’s proof of it being used on Twitter as far back as 2013, according to the New York Times. As for its sudden ubiquity, you can thank social media’s propensity for shaping language at lightning speed. The term was a runner-up for 2024’s Word Of The Year in the publication American Speech, losing out to “rawdog”. Incidentally, rawdogging modern life is a surefire way to crash out.

But why are we all crashing out? And why does the term feel so pertinent? The Guardian summarises the phenomenon as “the young people of today, overwhelmed by stress and emotionally impaired by their social media addictions, finding themselves prone to visceral outbursts”. What this analysis fails to mention, however, is what the young people are actually seeing on their phones while they scroll. Sure, there is brain rot and AI slop and GRWMs, but there is also a world being ravaged by climate change, people being ripped from their families and imprisoned without due process by masked men and the daily atrocities that our governments refuse to acknowledge. Is it any wonder that we’re crashing out?