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From puregatory to lifehoarding – how best to describe our strange, anxious times? | Emma Beddington

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From puregatory to lifehoarding – how best to describe our strange, anxious times? | Emma Beddington

The new words that end up a part of everyday speech can tell us a lot about the zeitgeist. In a world changing faster than ever, we need to coin some more

‘Maxxing” may be one of our words of the year – sufficient unto the joyless, self-optimising day, dreary as hell – but I’ve been introduced to some fun future contenders. How about “flawnting”? I’ve certainly rolled my eyes at influencers playing “the new parental status game of publicly performing imperfection to signal authenticity” online. I like “lifehoarding”, too – “optimising so hard for longevity that life itself goes unlived”. And which Guardian reader hasn’t experienced “puregatory” (“The plight of trying to live ethically, where even responsible choices feel compromised”)?

These coinages come from Future Words, a book by trend forecasters Rohit Bhargava and Henry Coutinho-Mason that seeks to fill some lexicographical lacunae for describing life in the fretful late 2020s. Out next week, it’s fun, but its list of suggested words conjures a world where life is whatever your devices, data, algorithms and AI decide it is, interspersed with attempts to fight for authentic human connection and experiences. That sounds about right, if depressing (I was also dispirited to discover the part AI played in creating the book – the authors say they “couldn’t have written Future Words without it” – but it makes sense AI would know what it’s doing to us.)



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