Last year started off unhinged then Brat summer dominated and it ended with a man accused of murder becoming the internet's boyfriend.
The celebrities that won 2024 were unapologetic like Chappell Roan, awkward like Amelia Dimoldenberg and embraced organic madness with their whole being like Timothée Chalamet.
Those who tried to sell us anything that didn't feel 100 per cent authentic were roundly rejected.
I'm thinking of Katy Perry and JLo, and also Kate Middleton's ill-fated attempt to stop speculation about her health.
So as 2025 begins and chaos continues to be IN, and highly polished very much OUT, the way Meghan Markle has returned to Instagram, after a five year hiatus, is totally confounding.
Not only did the playful video of her running barefoot on the beach in an all-white outfit - and later the slick trailer for her new Netflix show - feel like a throwback to 2015's lifestyle influencing's peak, the glossy, luxe aesthetic is in total opposition to what we know wins in culture right now.
The content feels just as dated, with Meghan seemingly picking up where she left off before she meet Prince Harry in 2016.
Back then she ran an aspirational lifestyle blog called The Tig (named after her favourite red wine) and had her own Instagram with three million followers who lapped up pictures of Meghan's dog, travels, food and the various yoga poses she could contort her body into.
The same high-end lifestyle guru vibes are present on her new account and appears to be the singular focus of the new series, With Love, Meghan.
The promo sees her serving elaborate cakes, picking fresh produce from a garden, selecting flowers by the stem and harvesting honey.
In a voiceover she says: "We are not in the pursuit of perfection, we are in the pursuit of joy."
But everything in the trailer, from the stunning country kitchen to the parade of deeply impractical pale-toned outfits she wears while cooking are nothing short of flawless.
If what is shown in the sizzle reel isn't perfection, I am not sure what is because this is giving tradwife.
Markle seems to have missed that uber rich lifestyle porn became so ubiquitous - and reviled - prior to 2020, that a wave of Schadenfreude-themed dramas became some of television's biggest hits in the preceding years.
The White Lotus, The Undoing, The Perfect Couple all relied on viewers contempt for the wealthy and their fancy lifestyles.
At the same time Eat the Rich became a common refrain and wealth-flashing backlash commonplace.
Maybe understanding the dynamics of culture in 2025 doesn't matter to Markle.
After all Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, to give her her full title, has racked up over eight million views across the two videos in little more than a day, and her new account already has over one million followers.
But while attention is one thing, relevance is something else entirely.