As 2025 draws to a close, numerous authoritative dictionaries and media outlets have unveiled their Words of the Year, each highlighting “Word of the Year.”
Whether it’s Oxford, Cambridge, Collins, Macquarie, Dictionary.com, or TIME and The Economist, although the keywords differ, they almost all point to the same theme: accelerating technology, surging emotions, and how we can maintain our boundaries.
This year, you may have been drawn into emotional black holes by inexplicable arguments while scrolling Douyin; unwittingly relied on AI prompts while writing papers; habitually turned to a vlogger, streamer, or even an AI chatbot for comfort in the loneliness of your room late at night; or painstakingly crafted a glossy, flawless persona on social media...
All these emotional trajectories of international students are reflected in the Words of the Year.
Rage Bait: Harvesting Emotions Online
Oxford awarded its 2025 Word of the Year to “rage bait.”
It refers to content intentionally designed to provoke anger: provocative, exaggerated, taken out of context—with one goal: to make you lose your cool and start cursing, so the platform can harvest emotional traffic.
Source: Oxford
Over the past year, usage of “rage bait” has tripled. The internet has shifted from grabbing attention to manipulating emotions.
Source: Oxford
For international students, rage bait is everywhere:
“International students may be deported?!”
“Useless majors: graduate and you’re unemployed”
“Major incident at a university! Chinese students, beware!”
“Real overseas living expenses exposed—you simply cannot afford it!”
......
All kinds of short videos taken out of context stir up conflict, with comment sections erupting into chaos.
Source: Web
This content isn’t meant to help you; it’s designed to exploit your most easily triggered emotions—worry, anger, unease—for the sake of traffic.
And that’s precisely the scary thing about rage bait: it knows what you’re afraid of, and it knows you’ll get hooked.
It’s especially important to learn how to stay calm amidst the overwhelming flood of information.
Aura Farming: The Carefully Crafted Persona
If rage bait on the internet manipulates our emotions, then another Word of the Year, “aura farming,” represents our active cultivation of image.
Source: Oxford
Aura farming refers to: through dressing, behavior, photos, and social media display, creating an aura that looks confident, charming, a bit mysterious yet effortless.
For instance, before an interview, you practice your smile, tone, and eye contact with AI-like precision; every LinkedIn entry is packaged into a flawless story, leaving no gaps; your WeChat Moments consistently project an image of diligence and discipline, and a shiny, perfect persona.
You know the “real you” isn’t that perfect every day; but you also believe this aura can help you enter a more exciting world.
In an era that demands young people be “perpetually excellent,” aura farming is not hypocrisy, but a survival strategy.
Source: Web
But don’t forget: aura is packaging, not identity.
You don’t need to be that “always-on ideal image” 24/7. We don’t have that many spectators; sometimes, it’s okay to just be yourself.
biohack: Self-Upgrade
Another Word of the Year, biohack, represents a very real lifestyle of this generation: we are treating ourselves as systems that can be constantly upgraded.
Source: Oxford
The biohack lifestyle includes: scientific dieting, functional beverages, supplements, sleep monitoring with smartwatches, productivity tools, and even cold water baths, meditation, time management systems...
For instance, chugging functional beverages to stay up late writing papers; using Apple Watch and Oura ring to track sleep and health; using ChatGPT to create study plans and summaries; endlessly optimizing yourself to not fall behind, even resorting to technological fixes on your face and body...
You may feel like you’re getting stronger, but you might also unknowingly fall into a “never-ending self-upgrade loop.”
Biohacking may enhance your body, but it’s not essential, and you’re not a project that requires round-the-clock debugging. The Taoist principle of wu wei—effortless action—is precisely a wisdom of living in harmony with nature.
Source: Web
The Words of the Year: A Love-Hate Relationship with AI
The Words of the Year chosen by major dictionaries all collectively focused on AI:
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Macquarie: AI slop (low-quality, error-ridden AI content)
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Collins: vibe coding (using natural language to instruct AI to write code)
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Dictionary.com: Agentic (the new concept of agentic AI in the age of artificial intelligence)
Behind these buzzwords is the same trend: AI brings efficiency, but also chaos.
Today’s international students have all experienced the benefits of AI: coding and doing homework, swiftly creating images and videos, quickly extracting key points from papers, autonomous driving, personal assistants...
But you’ve certainly been frustrated by “AI slop”: a mess of SEO-optimized, AI-patched articles riddled with errors; crucial assignments derailed by AI; searching for information only to be swamped by garbage content...
Source: Web
AI makes us more efficient, but also leaves us confused.
This is exactly what the 2025 Words of the Year want to tell us: in the AI era, your advantage isn’t knowing more, but learning to judge.
The 2025 Words of the Year are actually a microcosm of the lifestyles of this generation's young people.
If you look at rage bait, aura farming, biohack, parasocial, AI slop, vibe coding together, you’ll find they share a common thread: we are striving to hold onto our sense of self amidst massive technological change and emotional deluge.
When the world tries to make you angry, stay calm; when social media demands you show perfection, keep it real; when productivity tools surround you, maintain your rhythm; when AI sows confusion, uphold your judgment.
This is what the 2025 words of the year truly remind us: technology is the torrent, you are the helmsman. Emotions are just waves; judgment is your ship. And you are learning how to navigate this new world.
