Hailey Welch, dubbed the Hawk Tuah girl, seems to encapsulate 2024 at both its best and its worst, all at once. A moment. A meme. A rise. And a dramatic fall…
Hawk Tuah came at us like a giant spitball, seemingly out of nowhere—just a random person on the street making a provocative and sexually suggestive joke during an impromptu, intoxicated interview. Overnight, she was catapulted to stardom. She quit her job, launched a podcast, and even created her own cryptocurrency, which ultimately collapsed in scandal. Was it entirely her fault? Maybe not, but either way, she and others will have a lot of ‘splainin to do to federal regulators in the months ahead.
And isn’t that who we’ve become? We glide from one viral moment to the next without pausing for reflection. News bombards us 24/7, and the days seem to blur together. Time feels like it’s moving faster, the seconds ticking away quicker than ever before. We’re perpetually connected, and even in those rare moments when we try to unplug, we end up searching for a Wi-Fi signal to see what we might be missing.
This perfectly describes the state of pop culture today: a chaotic sprint from one sensation to the next, with no control over the reality we’re immersed in. It’s like a scene from Beetlejuice—our heads spinning wildly.
A lot happened this year. Donald Trump faced two assassination attempts, one of which left him bloodied in a very public display, his arm raised in victorious defiance. Political conventions teased us with the idea that Kamala Harris might become the next president, or at least that’s what the media wanted us to believe. But the media was wrong—so was everyone else. Predictions of a massive blow to Trump’s MAGA legacy fell flat. Instead, he won in what looks like a landslide of red states sweeping the nation.
And then there were the aliens. Oh, the aliens. Drones hovered above us, rumors swirled beneath us, and to top it all off, the Pope ended 2024 by knocking on an ancient door in the Vatican, unsealing—well, who knows what—for 2025.
Every year has its defining moments, but what happens when there are too many? When the deluge becomes too much to process, leaving us mentally drowning as we try to look back on the past twelve months?
It all feels like a blur. We could blame modern technology, the media, or shadowy puppeteers pulling our strings like some twisted ventriloquist act. But in the end, we are the ones who made “the hawk tuah girl” famous. We created the endless misery of doomscrolling that we claim to hate but can’t stop indulging in.
So, what’s next? Maybe we’ll do better in 2025—or maybe we’ll do more of the same. By the time 2026 rolls around, perhaps we’ll find the chaos we’ve spat out has gone lukewarm.
