We should have known the year 2025 would be hellish. Big change comes with pain. 

In a year that began with the Global Peace Summit in Geneva, but was marked by bombings, mass shootings, and a general sense of discord that could be felt across the world, disruption felt imminent. What was it all about? What were we supposed to be doing? What were we being forced to learn?

And as the year progressed, we should have known the Wood Snake would be shedding its skin. We had no idea it would be a long drawn-out process of unpeeling, revealing so many facets of decay. We had stuck to the superficial for so long, the rot had festered inside.

Like most things we choose to ignore because we do not care to understand it, we also missed the clues offered by numerology. In this science of numbers, each digit from one to nine bears meanings that can be relevant to our lives. One, by its very nature, is an omen of beginnings, restarts, resets. Nine, which the year 2025 was (2+0+2+5), signifies endings or conclusions.

So do we now know why 2025 felt like a big, open wound?

A time of healing is inevitable, but for now we must endure the pain. We must treat the sore consistently, mindfully.

Does it not hurt to know that the same things activists (many of whom became the desaparecidos or those who disappeared) were protesting are still the same 50 years later? Five decades! I know many in the newsroom today whose parents were just being born at the time.

Imperialism, or unwanted American influence, was rage bait then, but underneath the wounding had begun. 

Our country had suffered quietly at the hands of colonizers over the centuries, but nothing hurt quite as much as knowing that this was enabled by traitors to their race and culture. Makapili, a word that could have made it as Word of the Year, was a thing back in the Japanese time, and in every generation there is undoubtedly a word to match the meaning of this most abhorrent quality.

The year 2025 gave birth to some strange words of the year: Ragebait. Brainrot. 67.

It’s mind-boggling how the last is even a “word.”

Sixty-seven, or six seven, means nothing like the “in sixes or sevens with you” line from the song. Sixty-seven is a shrug, a “nonsensical, playful slang or a ‘brainrot.’” It means nothing in a world that has come to deride values as nothing, where liars are given a simple side-eye, where thieves are kowtowed to, where shock is a feeling like numbness because there can be nothing more shocking than the betrayal of people you trusted.

Sixty-seven is the “maybe” or “whatever” of Gen X. It means “nothing much,” a flippant rejection, a stepping away, an end, or almost giving up — and for those who have no clue what 67 means, it’s a warning we should best pay attention to.

Before it’s too late.