Why we spent all of 2025 asking, “Is this real?”

Corporations and celebrities weren’t the only ones behaving absurdly. A group of Indian tourists wearing coordinated yellow outfits performed the garba on the viewing deck of the Burj Khalifa. Indian managers repeatedly went viral online for their shockingly bad behaviour with hostile, unprofessional responses to employees asking for time off. Screenshots circulated on Reddit, LinkedIn and X, and the whole world wondered if it was really true that Indians behaved that way at work. Some people cried, fainted, tore their clothes off and had to get IV drips at the cinema while watching Saiyaara, which left the rest of us baffled. A reel showing Indian models and influencers at the Tyla concert in Mumbai got millions of views, with many exclaiming they were surprised Indian women could also be baddies. Others claimed people finding Indian women attractive had finally ‘ended racism’, an idea we all reacted to with a weary ‘Is this real?’

Even our memes this year were unreal and bizarre: “six seven” meant nothing and everything. Nobody over the age of 13 really understood it, and everybody asked, “Does this actually mean something? What is this? Is this real?” The biggest trends of the year were inexplicable phases we just had—Labubus, matcha, Dubai chocolate—things consumed and discarded at record speed. Cambridge and Oxford’s words of the year were ‘parasocial’ and ‘ragebait’; everything was far removed from reality.

And yet, despite all the mayhem, some moments made us realise the world is a strange, but beautiful place. Sometimes, unreal, too-good-to-be-true moments also happen, and they revive our hope in humanity. We find ourselves happily surprised and awestruck, asking each other, “Is this real?”