Are You Creating or Performing? A Deep Dive Into 2025's Most Controversial Creative Trends

What happens when creativity meets vulnerability in authentic ways?

We get art. Story. Lived experiences. Themes. Lessons. Soul.

But when content creation enters the picture, something shifts. Creative expression succumbs to image control. Dramatization. Visibility. Curation. Follower count. Likes.

Over the last two months, three blatant trends have taken over my feeds. At first glance, they seemed quite promising. But as I studied them, they each raised red flags, highlighting a question I've been asking myself for a while now:

Are we still creating from a place of authenticity and soul, or are we just trying to survive in an algorithm-driven world now?

Here's the reality: somewhere along the line, many of us stopped creating for the sake of creative fulfillment. Instead, we erased our lines in the sand and called it growth. We started sharing every ounce of content we could squeeze out of ourselves in real time. We decided that our critical thinking skills were an acceptable tradeoff for mass-produced social media content.

These top trends highlight this epidemic, so let's pull them apart.

1) CREATIVE TRENDS: MODERN JOURNALING

Introspection or social credit?

Recently, journaling has gone viral. "Morning pages" filled with supposed raw truth, shadow-work prompts saturating TikTok and birthing viral trends, and personal workbooks being cracked open and shared with followers are just a few examples.

People swear by the emotional clarity they get from scribbling in notebooks at dawn or by guided reflection tools like The Shadow Work Journal. Finding genuine clarity with these tools is wonderful, but what if this wave of public journaling has become more about being seen than getting real? When someone posts pages of their notebook to their feed, are they cultivating creativity or performing vulnerability for likes?

Controversial take: when we transform honest journaling into curated or embellished content, it becomes a spectator sport, rendering a helpful tool for self-critique a performance art for social praise.

2) WRITERS RESISTING AI

Crafting identity or rejecting modernity?

As an author, this one hits different. As an expert on the relationship we have with our own creativity and inner self, it hits way different. It's no secret that AI has split the literary community, and the reasons run deeper than the words we read.

A new study looked at writers who reject AI tools and why. What it discovered is that some writers are now building whole identities around the resistance of AI. They claim rejection protects authenticity, craft, and trust within the community. While admirable, it begs a controversial question: is this a real and honest stance, or a virality-inducing echo-chamber? Who really benefits from the vocalized outrage? The frustrating truth is that resisting AI doesn't make you a guardian of creativity because other people can and will choose to use AI in their work.

Personally, I'm not a fan. But until I own my own publishing house, I won't be policing anyone's choices around AI. Instead, I want my energy to be going into authentic content that can help others. Crusader identity? Not for me . . . even for likes.

3) INTERACTIVE, PERSONALIZED CONTENT

Engagement win or privacy trap?

Imagine trying to read an article that pauses mid‑paragraph to ask a question, offers a quiz that unlocks the next section, or tailors dialogue based on your earlier clicks. (Uh, just let me read the article, dang it!) That’s the direction of content now: deeply interactive, data‑driven, and strangely personalized.

In fact, just in the last two weeks content strategists have spotlighted this kind of interactive writing. On one hand, it might mean the reinvention of engaging storytelling. On the other, it harvests readers' input and reroutes their attention. Giving us our own paths through content disguises the harvesting of our micro-data as something akin to convenience. Customization. Intimacy, even.

And all the while, creators get more clicks, platforms gather more personal information, and readers wander through content tailored by algorithms that never want them to stop consuming.

Personalized writing feels like a new frontier, but we must be aware of the potential implications. If the reading experience becomes nothing but a data-collection tool for engagement metrics, where does that leave the act of writing and its purpose from a creative perspective or, perhaps even more-so, an information perspective?

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

At the end of the day, creativity is more a pulse than a trend-chaser. But right now, it feels like we're caught in an authenticity tug-o-war. It could just be the price of trying to exist in a world that constantly wants to watch what we're doing right this moment . . . and then what will happen next.

On repeat. Insatiably.

Well, I propose we don't have to play along.

Every single moment we create for ourselves doesn't have to be warped and exploited for public consumption. We don't have to expose ourselves, our truths, our embellishments, or our privacy for the sake of growing a digital audience in an online world comprised of more and more fake profiles every day. Before we post, we can reflect. Before we engage, we can check our material for honesty and value.

That's how we can reclaim what it really means to share what we create . . . and why.

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~ I’d love your thoughts! ~

Is public journaling authentic or just curated vulnerability?

Is AI resistance a noble act or manufactured authenticity?

Have interactive elements made content better or created engagement traps?