What's your Word Of The Year?

Language mirrors life. For 2024, WOTY picks like 'dystopian,' 'demure,' 'deadname,' and 'implode' reflect our shared anxieties. But what's your personal WOTY?

What's that one word that sums you 2024 for you? Kakistocracy, BrainRot and Enshittification are amongst the official winners, but what's your deeply personal word-of-the-year? Would love to hear your what and the why, please add them in the comments below.

Here's mine, but before that, a little story.

Rewind back some 18 years. To a cosy little studio of our own, in Northern England, Manchester. Sitting tight between the famed Manchester United's ‘Theatre of Dreams’ and the the iconic Old Trafford Cricket Stadium. David and I founded IdeasFoundry there, and organically ended up doing less and less of traditional design work, ie, the website/brochure/branding kind. And leveraging more on the user research, insights, strategy, blueprints - and sometimes handing these over to our client’s pre-existing agencies for "execution”. Behavioural Design, Service Design, Business Design, User Research weren't still titles in circulation, but these were our playgrounds - without sharp demarcations. Oblivious, we dabbled and often times, jumped across these.

One of our clients had a peculiar problem: headquartered in Europe, their focus was on surrendering complex insurance policies and restructuring these to unlock value. Part of the word "surrender" figured in their name and as they looked to expand to another geography, the word was a blocker. It had negative connotations.

Their dilemma was our brief—retain or change? Could we quantify loss of brand value vs opportunity? If change, what should it be and why? But, this isn't a case study about them.

It’s about the word with seemingly negative connotations: surrender.

But in spiritual parlance, surrender has a whole new layer and dimension.

And nothing sums up that layer of meaning as this quote by the Buddha.

Letting Go…

Surrender, in spiritual terms implies faith, reassurance and an ocean of belief.

It takes me back to a bright, sunny day in the Andaman seas. To a peeled, tanned white-and-orange boat bobbing on the clear turquoise waters. I’m sitting with my son on the opposite ends of the boat—to be specific—on the wooden ledge. Our back is towards the sea below. Our feet inside—flippered-up (if that’s a word). We are wearing the usual heavy, body-hugging, uncomfortable scuba gear. There were oxygen tanks on our back and a heavy belt around our waist. But the most uncomfortable and scary part was this: our instructors urging us to let go and simply fall back. “Do nothing, just fall back, back on your back”.

Simply put, the instruction said: “let those oxygen cylinders pull you down”. To the sea below!

You won’t drown

“Don’t worry”, they reassure repeatedly, “you won’t drown!”

We did not step back into the comfort of the boat. Nor did we take off our heavy, uncomfortable gear and head back to safer shores. We refused to surrender to our fears or the voices in our head. Instead, a couple of seconds later, we simply obeyed the orders—surrendered to the moment and let go. We fell backwards, into the sea below.

Trusting.

Believing.

Surrendering to the here and the now.

Of course, the surrender had it’s own amazing reward. After those first few seconds of discomfort and confusion about which side was up, an amazing underwater world opened up for us. Below. Up. Below.

New colours, new contours, new creatures. A whole new world. An almost alien world hidden in plain sight, that we had never seen before.

So, why surrender?

In a year characterised by words like ‘deadname’, ‘deepfake’ and ‘dystopian’, characterised by the increasingly declining trust in public institutions, brands, apps and services—the words ‘belief’, ‘trust’ and ‘surrender’ seem counter-intuitive.

But hear me out—Who you are is not dictated by Facebook or Twitter/X. You are not defined by the anxieties, the sense of lack, emptiness, FOMOs brought to by the images you see on Insta or the millions trying to get a slice of your attention—and your wallet. The idea of surrender is beautifully summed up in these words from a guided meditation that speaks of letting go:

“I surrender my regrets.

I surrender who I think I am.

I surrender who I have told myself I am.

I surrender who I tell others I am.

I surrender my desire to be someone else.

I surrender my desire to be anywhere else.

I surrender to the timelessness.”

Vaz Sriharan

This surrender to the stillness, to switching off the noise and frenzy that is bent on defining who I am and how I fit into this world is what has been a really tiny insight that has continued to grow over the years. This year, paradoxically, the word surrender, has been added to the series. Surrendering to the journey of understanding and discovering who I truly am.

“When I let go of who I am
I become what I might be.”

Lao Tze

A word to set you free

Here’s to being and becoming, and to new beginnings, in 2025.

I look forward to hearing your very own deeply-personal word-of-the-year! May the word free you! Free you from your fears and the weight of expectations. And take you beyond the noise, and the uncomfortable zeitgeist…

Images (in order of appearance) by Mohamed Amine Gdoura, Patrick Venegas, and Mohamed Amine Gdoura

---

Notes

Enshittification “In 2022, Author Doctorow coined the word “enshittification”, which has just been crowned Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year.” https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/nov/26/enshittification-macquarie-dictionary-word-of-the-year-explained

Brain Rot “Our experts noticed that ‘brain rot’ gained new prominence this year as a term used to capture concerns about the impact of consuming excessive amounts of low-quality online content, especially on social media” https://corp.oup.com/word-of-the-year/

Kakistrocracy “The Economist has crowned 𝙠𝙖𝙠𝙞𝙨𝙩𝙤𝙘𝙧𝙖𝙘𝙮—“rule by the worst”—as its word of the year, inspired by its opposite, aristocracy (“rule by the best”).” https://www.economist.com/culture/2024/11/29/the-economists-word-of-the-year-for-2024 (behind a paywall).