2025 was the year of the snake. And if your social feeds looked anything like mine, it was also the year everyone finally admitted they were struggling.
I watched post after post roll through, with people being fully, almost startlingly vulnerable about their hardships. Financial stress, identity crises, loneliness, burnout, you name it. Many noted the exhaustion of navigating these trying times while pretending everything was fine.
And I must say, it really surprised me. Because these weren't the usual flavours of online vulnerability, which usually looks like trauma dumping for engagement or performative breakdown content.
This was something else. People were pointing to the zodiac: "it was a snake year, what did we expect?”, and suddenly having permission to be honest about how hard things had been.
And then, almost in the same breath, sharing genuine hope for 2026, the year of the horse. A collective exhale and a decision to try again.
I think (I hope) we might be witnessing something important here.
There's something about the Chinese zodiac framing that makes vulnerability feel less isolated, less like you're the only one failing. It creates like a gentle scaffolding for honesty. When you say "the snake year broke me," you're participating in a shared narrative as opposed to admitting to personal failures.
You're saying "yeah, me too" to thousands of other people who also felt like 2025 chewed them up (and it DID.)
The zodiac isn’t the reason for our struggles, obviously.
But naming it this way helps process it collectively. It transforms "I'm drowning" into "we went through something together." And that collectiveness matters. Because what I've noticed in the comments on these posts is real community care happening.
People showing up for each other, sharing their own struggles, offering not solutions but solidarity. "The snake year got me too." "We made it through." "Here's to the year of the horse being kinder to us." It's the internet doing what it's actually capable of when we let it: connecting people who feel alone and reminding them they're not.
We've lost so many traditional rituals for marking time and making meaning together.
We don't gather the same way, don't have the same collective ceremonies to process what we've been through. But we're building new ones in these digital spaces, like the year of the snake. Because from what I can see, it wasn’t even a trend. Just a way of creating structure for shared experience, a way to say "time passed, it was hard, let's acknowledge that together."
What makes the snake year posts feel different from other online vulnerability is the sincerity of them.
After years of irony poisoning and brand-speak and carefully curated authenticity, people just seem... tired of performing.
The zodiac thing offers a way back to genuine vulnerability because it's framed as reflection rather than content. It’s less about trying to create a viral moment and instead just processing your year alongside thousands of others doing the same.
And then there's the hope piece.
The "year of the horse" optimism that follows may seem like forced silver-lining thinking. But there’s a tiny glimmer in me that hopes it’s people deciding together that they're ready to try again.
That maybe this turn of the calendar will be gentler, and we can hold both the hardship and the hope without one cancelling out the other.
There's something beautiful about mass hope like this.
Not individual manifestation or personal optimisation, but collective decision that we're not done yet.
I don't know if this shift will stick. The internet sure has a way of taking tender things and weaponising them and turning genuine moments into content strategies and brand opportunities. I'm sure someone's already figuring out how to monetise zodiac vulnerability.
But for now, in these early weeks of the horse year, I'm watching people be remarkably human with each other online, and it gives me hope.
Because THIS is what the internet can still be good for. Not just the discourse and the arguments and the performance, but these quieter moments of collective processing. These small rituals we're building to help each other through. The permission to struggle and the decision to hope, done together instead of alone.
I really hope we see more of this. I hope we protect it. I hope the year of the horse is kinder to all of us.
-Sophie Randell, Writer
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