Ask Me Again Next Year
I’ve been watching myself watch the year end. This is already a kind of performance. The annual ritual of trying to name what just happened to us, as if language could pin the butterfly without killing it. If 2024 was “Default Fake”—the inversion from real unless proven otherwise to fake until verified—then 2025 is... what, exactly?
The year is bleeding out its final weeks. Below my window, the red wave of SantaCon is almost over in the LES, thankfully. And Dictionary.com has declared its Word of the Year: “67.”
Pronounced six-seven if you don’t have kids. A phrase that means, according to the lexicographers themselves, both everything and nothing. A sound that kids shout in classrooms and basketball courts and In-N-Out restaurants. Where, as seen on TikTok, the chain has quietly removed the number from its ticket system because teenagers kept erupting into collective ecstasy whenever it was called. Schools are banning it. The phrase emerged from a drill track by Chicago artist Skrilla, who told the Wall Street Journal he “never put an actual meaning on it” and “still would not want to.”
The creator refuses to define it. The kids don’t care. It spread anyway. Because it hits, because the repetition itself is the joke, because understanding that there is no meaning is the marker of being in on it.
I keep reaching for something like “Default Performed” to characterize 2025. Everything is a move, everything is positioning, we’re all just making calculated gestures at each other across the void. But the phrase dies in my mouth the moment I try to say it. Because I keep looking at the kids.
I don’t have any. Won’t. My wife and I made that choice together, checking in year after year—is this still what you want?—and it meant something. We were so careful with meaning. We tended it like a garden. We believed that if you kept asking the question, kept verifying, the answer would stay true.
She left anyway.
You know that scene in Blade? The opening. The rave. The sprinklers kick on and it’s not water, it’s blood, raining down, and everyone is revealed for what they are. That’s what this year has felt like. The fire suppression system that was supposed to protect you instead exposes what was always underneath. The meanings you made. The story you told yourself about your life. Blood on the dance floor, and nowhere to hide.
I thought if you named something carefully enough, checked in often enough, asked is this real with enough sincerity, you could make it stay. That meaning was a kind of protection. That the butterfly could survive the pin.
It can’t. It never could. The kids already know this.
So I watch other people’s children and try to learn their operating system—a generation I’ll never have a representative in—wondering if they figured out something I didn’t. That you can skip the meaning and go straight to the effect. That maybe that’s safer.
The kids don’t care about real versus fake. This isn’t cynicism. It’s not even irony. It’s that the question itself doesn’t clock. Like asking them to evaluate whether a song is true. They’re not assessing authenticity; they’re assessing effect. Does it hit. Does it land. Does it move something in me or give me something I can use. A “fake” thing that resonates is worth infinitely more than a “real” thing that doesn’t. Truth isn’t the metric. Effect is.
“67” is the purest distillation of this I’ve seen. It’s been called “a burst of energy that spreads and connects people long before anyone agrees on what it actually means.” That’s not a bug. That’s the entire operating system. The older generations look at a phrase with no semantic content going viral and see brain rot, see the collapse of meaning, see children who have been destroyed by algorithms. The kids look at us looking at them and see what? People asking the wrong question. People demanding to know what something means when the only relevant question is what it does.
Gen Z didn’t lose faith in reality. They never had it. Not because they’re broken, not because the algorithms ate their brains, but because the concept of a stable, verifiable “real” that exists independent of its circulation was always, on some level, a fiction we older generations maintained for our own comfort. They’re just playing a different game. One they were born into, one where the rules were never the rules we thought they were.
The Mandinka have a proverb: when a griot dies, it is as if a library has burned to the ground. Griots are West African oral historians. They don’t write stories down, they perform them, adapting to the room each time. 67 is griot behavior. It spreads by being shouted, not by being understood. The 2025 update to the proverb might be: when a TikTok sound dies, no library burns. The shouting back was the library.
The kids shouting six-seven aren’t actually skipping meaning. They’re getting it faster, with less exposure. Call-and-response, but atomized, distributed, safe. You shout into the void. Twenty voices shout back. The meaning isn’t in the content. It’s in the response itself. The proof that someone is there. That you’re not alone. That you exist because something echoed.
I was doing the same thing. Just slower. Riskier. One voice instead of twenty. One response that had to keep coming back, year after year.
Is this still what you want?
The question was never really about the answer. It was about the call-and-response itself. The ritual proof that we were still there, still willing to say it back to each other. The meaning was in the repetition. In the checking.
The kids found a way to get that proof without the exposure. No single voice matters enough to break you when it stops. They’ve distributed the risk across a thousand strangers who will shout back without knowing your name. It’s brilliant, actually. It’s a survival adaptation. It’s the logical response to a world where meanings don’t stay true no matter how carefully you tend them.
I ran the experiment. I played the longer game. One voice. One response. Sixteen years of is this still what you want?
And then the voice stopped. And there was nothing to verify. And all that careful meaning-making was just—
What? A waste? No. I don’t think so. But not a protection either. Not the thing I thought it was.
We’re demanding paper receipts in a cashless economy. We’re asking but is it real when the kids are asking but does it work. And I can feel both questions living in my chest at once, can feel myself toggling between them depending on the hour, depending on whether I’m the one being fooled or the one doing the fooling.
But maybe those were never the right questions. Maybe the real question is older and simpler and has nothing to do with epistemology at all.
Somewhere, right now, a teenager is shouting six-seven into the void, and twenty other teenagers are shouting it back, and none of them could tell you what it means, and all of them know exactly what it does. It proves you’re there. It proves someone is listening. It does the thing that language was invented to do, before we burdened it with all this weight about truth and meaning and what’s real.
I don’t know if they’ve figured something out or if they’ve just found a safer way to do the same thing humans have always done. I don’t know if their way is better or just less expensive. I don’t know if the meaning I made was worth what it cost, or if I was just a sucker who thought careful meant safe in a world that had already moved on.
But I know what question I’m actually asking myself, underneath all the cultural criticism and the trend reports and the performance of noticing.
Would you do it again?
Check in, year after year. Risk the single voice. Believe that if you tend something carefully enough, it becomes more real. Know that it doesn’t. Know that she can still leave. Know that the meaning you made won’t protect you from anything.
Would you do it again?
I don’t know. I’m not sure the question has an answer that stays true.
But I’m still asking.
Maybe that’s the point. Not the answer, but the willingness to keep asking a question that might destroy you. The kids found a way around that. I’m not sure I want the way around.
Is this still what you want?
Yeah. I think so. Even now. Even after.
Is this still true?
Ask me again next year.