The price of a loud year (2025)

In twenty-twenty-five, we learned too late

That every thought could seal a certain fate,

For words once freed refused to fade or sleep,

They stayed to count the promises we keep.

We spoke in posts, in stories, streams, and lies,

In filtered truths and borrowed battle cries,

Each sentence dressed to travel far and fast,

Yet built to live forever, not just last.

A whisper now could start a public fire,

A joke could rise and hang us on the wire,

Context drowned beneath a scrolling sea,

Where half a thought became identity.

We paid in friendships broken over tone,

In screenshots saved to stone what once was known,

In sentences removed from time and place,

Then held like mirrors inches from the face.

Silence grew expensive, rare, and strange,

While noise was traded daily for some change,

Approval bought with carefully shaped rage,

Outrage rehearsed and sold upon a stage.

To speak too much was seen as being real,

To pause was treated like a hidden deal,

So people talked to prove they still belonged,

And learned too late when they had spoken wrong.

Careers were built and ended in a day,

By things we typed and could not take away,

No trial, no night to cool the heated mind,

Just instant judgment, ruthless and unkind.

We lost the art of waiting for the truth,

Of letting wisdom ripen with our youth,

We traded depth for reach, and speed for sense,

And paid with trust as part of the expense.

The cost was calm, the cost was nuance too,

The cost was knowing what not saying can do,

The cost was space to change, to be unsure,

To grow beyond a thought that felt secure.

Silence became a rebel’s quiet act,

A way to stay both human and intact,

A shield against the hunger to be seen,

A refusal to perform the in-between.

For those who learned, they speak with measured breath,

They weigh each word like it remembers death,

They know in twenty-twenty-five and on,

That once it’s said, the silence it is gone.

So let this year remember what we paid,

For every careless phrase we ever made,

And let us learn, before we choose to shout,

Some truths survive because we leave them out.