Have you ever stopped to wonder what a single word can tell us about an entire year—or even about who we're becoming as a society?
Welcome to FreeAstroScience, where we break down complex ideas into something you can actually use. Today, we're exploring something that touches every part of your life, from the apps on your phone to the relationships you hold dear. We're talking about trust—or in Italian, fiducia—the word Treccani chose to define 2025. But here's the twist: this isn't just about a dictionary choice. It's about a quiet crisis unfolding right beneath our noses.
Grab a coffee. Settle in. By the end of this piece, you'll see the world—and your own decisions—a little differently. Let's dive in together.
🔍 Words That Mirror Us: Why "Word of the Year" Matters
Every December, lexicographers around the world perform a kind of ritual. They sift through millions of conversations, articles, and social media posts. They're looking for the word—the one that captures something true about who we've been for the past twelve months.
Think of it like a linguistic time capsule. Or better yet, a mirror held up to society's face.
These aren't random picks. They're extracted from what Elena Dal Pra beautifully calls "the immense, bubbling cauldron of language" . Each word tells a story. And sometimes, that story makes us uncomfortable.
Why should you care?
Because these words don't just describe the past. They hint at where we're headed. They reveal our collective anxieties, our obsessions, and—if we're paying attention—our blind spots.
⚡ The Vocabulary of Unease: What 2025's Words Reveal
Let's look at what the major dictionaries chose for 2025. It's... not exactly uplifting.
Do you see the pattern?
Rage bait tells us we're being manipulated into anger—often by what Dal Pra calls the "broligarchy" of Silicon Valley. Remember when clickbait felt like a problem? Now it seems almost innocent compared to content engineered to make us furious.
Vibe coding speaks to a growing opacity. We're building systems we don't fully understand, hoping the AI "gets it right." It's trust without verification.
AI slop names something we've all encountered: that uncanny flood of generic, soulless, sometimes completely wrong content churned out by machines.
Parasocial reminds us that many of our "relationships" today are one-way streets. We feel connected to influencers, streamers, and celebrities who don't know we exist.
Every single one of these words, without exception, points to the same underlying problem: the erosion of trust .
💡 Why Did Treccani Choose "Trust"?
While other dictionaries catalogued our symptoms, Italy's Treccani went straight to the root.
In 2024, they chose rispetto (respect). In 2025? Fiducia—trust.
Here's how Treccani defines it:
"The attitude toward others or oneself that results from a positive evaluation of facts, circumstances, and relationships, by which one has confidence in one's own or others' possibilities, generally producing a feeling of security and tranquility."
Read that again slowly. Doesn't it feel like a description from another era? A time when "security and tranquility" weren't punchlines?
The philosopher Mark Hunyadi, in his 2025 book Credere nella fiducia (Believing in Trust), argues that trust isn't just useful—it's necessary. It's a mental precondition that comes before every action we take.
Think about it:
- You cross the street trusting drivers will stop at red lights
- You eat at restaurants trusting the food won't poison you
- You read this article trusting I'm not making things up
Without trust, we'd be paralyzed. We couldn't function.
As Salvatore Natoli puts it in his book Il rischio di fidarsi (The Risk of Trusting): "To trust is good; not to trust... is worse".
🌊 The Slow Erosion: How We Lost Faith in Everything
So what happened? How did we get here?
The Pandemic Changed Everything—Even Door Handles
Remember 2020? The pandemic didn't just threaten our health. It shattered something deeper. Suddenly, the physical world itself became suspect .
A door handle wasn't just a door handle anymore. It was a potential threat. The air we breathed could betray us. Even other people's bodies—beyond any intention—became dangerous.
We covered our faces. We hid the very expressions that, since the beginning of human history, had communicated truth before we even opened our mouths .
The Post-Truth Decade
The pandemic landed on top of a decade already sliding toward what scholars call the "epistemic crisis." We'd entered the age of "epistemia"—where knowledge gets confused with appearance .
Beatrice Cristalli and Walter Quattrociocchi describe a world where we're represented more than lived. Where information has been wildly disintermediated. Where every platform has a hidden purpose beyond its stated function: to harvest your data .
How can we trust tools when their creators—those "architects of control" discussed by Paolo Benanti and Sebastiano Maffettone—remain shadowy figures with unknown motives?
🤖 AI and the Death of "I Saw It With My Own Eyes"
Into this already fractured landscape, artificial intelligence arrived like a wedge driven into a crack. It didn't just widen the fissure—it caused what Dal Pra calls "a leap in dimension" .
When Your Eyes Deceive You
Here's the terrifying part: it's our senses being fooled now.
OpenAI named their image and video generation app Sora—Japanese for "sky" . A poetic name for a tool that can fabricate reality so convincingly that old phrases lose their meaning.
"I saw it with my own eyes!" used to settle arguments. Not anymore.
We've jumped from "incredible but true" to "completely credible but false" .
"I read it in the newspaper!" already dated you and made you seem like a relic from the 20th century. Now even video evidence proves nothing.
The Hallucination Problem Is Only Half the Story
When discussing AI reliability, experts typically count "hallucinations"—the errors, the fabrications, the gaps. But Dal Pra asks a haunting question:
"What happens when that enormous combinatory power of stolen words works correctly? When it 'gets it right'? Can it tell us a truth?"
What does a statement mean when there's no subject behind it? No responsibility? No body with lived experience? No mysterious human brain that felt something before putting it into words?
Han Kang, in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, reflected on the bodily dimension of language. Adelphi published it with a title that feels more urgent than ever: "In the darkest night, language asks us what we're made of" .
🛠️ Can We Rebuild What's Been Broken?
Here's where we refuse to end on despair.
Yes, trust has eroded. Yes, the foundations feel shaky. But trust isn't just something we lose—it's something we can choose to rebuild.
What Trust Actually Does for Us
The Devoto-Oli dictionary offers perhaps the most useful definition:
"The conviction that something or someone corresponds to our expectations, motivated by a true or presumed elective affinity or by a tested margin of guarantee."
Trust is the mental disposition that allows us to move through the world:
- Among physical objects—confident they'll work as expected
- Within social and institutional systems—counting that, even in disagreement, people won't abandon shared rules
- With other humans—who mostly follow common behavioral patterns
The Path Forward
Hunyadi calls for something radical: a "universal declaration of the rights of the human mind" . A framework to protect our cognitive autonomy in an age designed to manipulate it.
But we don't need to wait for declarations. We can start smaller:
- Slow down. Don't share before verifying.
- Seek sources. Not algorithms, but people with names and reputations.
- Protect attention. Your focus is the most valuable currency in the attention economy.
- Build real relationships. The parasocial ones won't sustain you.
Dal Pra closes her reflection with a surprising source of hope: Pope Leo XIV, who chose his name specifically to address the AI revolution—echoing Leo XIII, who faced the Industrial Revolution with Rerum Novarum .
Whether you're religious or not, there's something comforting in the idea that humanity has faced massive disruptions before. And we've found our footing.
✨ Final Thoughts: The Sleep of Reason
We started with a question: Can we still trust anything?
The honest answer is complicated. The easy trust of previous generations—in institutions, in media, in what our eyes showed us—may be gone forever. But that doesn't mean trust itself is dead. It means we need a new kind of trust. One that's more conscious. More earned. More carefully tended.
At FreeAstroScience.com, we believe in explaining complex ideas in simple terms. Not because we think you can't handle complexity—but because clarity is itself a form of respect. Of trust.
We also believe in something Goya captured in his famous etching: "The sleep of reason produces monsters."
Stay curious. Stay skeptical. But stay engaged. Your mind is worth protecting—and so is your capacity to trust wisely.
Come back to FreeAstroScience whenever you need a place where science meets humanity, where hard questions get honest exploration, and where you're never alone in wondering what it all means.
Happy New Year. May your 2026 be filled with people and ideas worthy of your trust.
📧 Did this article make you think?
Share it with someone who needs to read it. And remember: at FreeAstroScience, we believe knowledge should be free, accessible, and human.
Post a Comment