AI vs memory with a side of moringa soup

The future, according to tech broligarchs, belongs to AI. Those ubiquitous vowels with main character energy and zero emotional boundaries.

Maybe they’re right. The future arrived in 2025 with manic velocity. And the seductive promise of a better life. It wrote our emails in a tone that suggests we drink more water than we do and have no childhood trauma. It automated our thought-leader cosplay on LinkedIn. It gave the left-brained a hazardous strain of creative hubris. And the right-brained, “orchestrated workflows”. Meanwhile, multimodal neural networks and other SaaS-y buzzwords “unlocked autonomous value” in 2025.

Congratulations, your existential crisis that was already wearing a lanyard, is now the logline of Severance.

Yet, every December, the world pauses briefly from squinting into the future techno-abyss and performs the annual ritual of the year-end lookback.

The same futurists that spent twelve months treating our attention like inventory, suddenly show up wearing Santa hats, tie a bow around their engagement metrics, and gift us our Wrapped, our Recaps, our “Moments That Defined 2025.” Because, apparently, even algorithms need closure.

But what do those temples of data, those monasteries of monetisation show us?

Not a graph of our view-through rates of AI slop.
Not the exact millisecond we quit a rage-bait video.
Not the 23 workflows autonomously orchestrated.

Instead, they show us blurry montages of weddings, reunions, dance trends, heartbreaks, stadiums singing in unison, small kindnesses filmed in potato lighting and edited at approximately 115 BPM.

They take a break from speaking in Agentic, and suddenly speak in Human: “Here is what moved you. Here is your soundtrack, your people, your moments.” Some platforms even start sounding like they’ve been doing breath-work and journaling.

Spotify tells me I belong to a tribe of the top 14% of listeners of an artist whose name sounds like a WiFi password. And suddenly, I am not a dataset. I am a sensitive soul with questionable taste.

Instagram’s recap turns into a mass therapy session conducted by cricket: India’s Champions Trophy win, Virat Kohli’s emotional retirement from Test cricket, the women’s team’s World Cup victory, the resurrection of “Ee Sala Cup Namdu.”

And if you want the year’s aesthetic in a single pixel, Pantone (a gatekeeper of colour swatches that behaves like a modern tech company) declared its Colour of the Year for 2025 as Mocha Mousse and of 2026 as the controversial Cloud Dancer. Two wonderfully un-futuristic hues.

Meanwhile, in other parts of the world, there’s the meta ritual of the ritual. “TikTok Wrapped 2025” trended. Because even platforms now need platforms to emotionally process the platforms.

Making its debut this year is ChatGPT — our new polite therapist — summarising our emotional arcs — as if it knows us better than our mothers — which is alarmingly true. (em-dashes added humanly, for irony) It reminds me that this year, I was “chattiest” on September 21st, trying to find the exact recipe for moringa soup (which will eventually taste like condensed hospital air).

By the end of the year, even the most LLM of LLMs seems to say:
This. This is what can’t be automated.

Is the year-end recap ritual just marketing fluff? As a marketer in consumer tech, I say this without shame - yes, it is. But it’s also a profound confession. Tech companies that want to grow, must understand what we keep as memories, not what they track as metrics.

When we look back, we don’t remember how optimised our life was. We remember the ache of being human. The break-up that led to the apology that led to the hug. We remember the silence after the bad news, the warmth of a hand on a shoulder, the stupid joke that broke the tension at exactly the right moment. The grainy video of our cat behaving like a dog. We remember the inner work that hurt and therefore felt real.

The future may belong to AI. But the present will always belong to our past stubborn, messy, flawed, irrational human selves.

And perhaps that’s the bargain humanity is making with AI. We will embrace AI with the same eager anxiety with which we embraced the printing press, the internet, smartphones, and the idea that work-life balance is an app you can download.

But our highlight reel won’t be a heat map of our productivity. It will be a fuzzy montage of feelings - warm as mocha mousse, easily baited into rage, yearning for authenticity in a world of slop, and still, somehow, looking ahead like tomorrow might be kinder than the feed.

Last year, I don’t remember the 42 minutes I saved on email drafting. I remember the moringa soup. It was disappointing. But at least I made it myself.

The author is the head of brand communications strategy, Marquee Sports events at JioStar. Views expressed are her own and not attributable to the company.