It just so happens that all the time we were spending with our noses buried in our phones and our faces scrunched up in frustration last year was not just a bad habit but actually the mood of the era. "Rage bait" has been declared the Word of the Year for 2025 by Oxford University Press, and to be honest, it feels a little personal.
It is now 2026, and in retrospect, it is a perfect fit. We didn’t spend 2025 gathering or acquiring new skills. We spent it watching videos of people making pasta in the toilet or people making claims so obviously wrong they had to be lying, all so we could comment, “YOU ARE WRONG.”
For those who were lucky enough to spend 2025 living under a rock (which actually sounds pretty good), Oxford has defined rage bait as "content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage." In simpler words: It’s posting things just to upset people.
Why? Because anger pays the bills. The point is to get you to stop scrolling, get angry, and share the post to show your friends how bad it is. The people who make this content do not care if you hate them.
The thing is, this is our problem. Well, ours and the computer algorithms that drive social media. While we all think we love watching cute cats, the truth is we click on things we’re angry about a lot more. The algorithm recognizes that a happy person hangs up the phone, but an angry person keeps on typing. Smart move by the creators, if you ask me.
Rage bait was not a lone contestant. It had to beat two other very tough contenders to take the crown, both of which reveal a lot about our modern lives.
The first thing that came up was "aura farming." If you don't spend all your time online, this is what it means to be terminally online, or shall we say, chronically online: it's trying to be cool and mysterious on purpose. It’s creating a public persona that screams, "I am confident and chill," which is often accomplished by taking pictures of yourself that look like you're not even trying (even though you probably took 500 pictures to get that one shot).
The second runner-up was “biohack.” This is the art of attempting to outsmart death by optimizing your body. It’s like the tech billionaires who inject vitamins or wake up at 3:00 AM to take ice baths so they can live forever.
It is only fitting that "rage bait" won them both. While some of us were trying to look cool (aura farming) or live forever (biohacking), the rest of us were just sitting on the couch, staring at our phones, getting angry at strangers. Rage won because it is the most universal experience we have left.
Oxford has been choosing these words since 2004, and the list is like a history of how the internet has been slowly breaking our brains.
We went from drawing cute faces to being lazy to just being angry.
These words are chosen by the Oxford experts to "reflect the cultural significance of the period." If "rage bait" is the most important thing about 2025, then it seems that we've been manipulated by our own screens all year.
So, here’s to 2026. Maybe this year we can attempt to scroll past the things that make us mad. But for real, we probably won’t.
