Last night before bed I caught a BBC News announcement: Oxford University Press had picked their 2025 “Words of the Year.”
Rage Bait. Aura Farming. Biohack.
Here’s what they mean:
- Rage Bait — stuff online meant to make you mad or outraged so you click, comment, and share—all for viral impact.
- Aura Farming — crafting an image or vibe so people see you a certain way, like confidence, coolness, or mystique.
- Biohack — trying to upgrade your body or mind with diet, tech, supplements, or routines.
Geez, I thought. How self-centered can we be?! I went to sleep thinking about how bad our cultural fixation on being noticed has become. Whatever the cost.
Then this morning, as I woke up and lay there, the song “Zombie” by The Cranberries crept into my inner monologue.
This happens to me a lot — like with “What If God Was One of Us” a while back. A song just pops into my mind, and suddenly it’s like a neon sign pointing me to something bigger.
Zombie, zombie… what’s in your head?
And with a click of the ruby red slippers, that lyric landed right beside those words from the night before.
They’re so crude and even darkly comical — if they weren’t so serious. I pictured a scene straight out of the movie Zombieland: the walking dead bumping into walls, motivated by a single impulse to feed on others. Self-serving. Self-feeding.
Rage Bait. Most of society is glued to their devices. Clicking, scrolling, reacting to outrage after outrage. Hearts have been hijacked. Minds have been stirred to frenzy.
And the content “creators” who put all that out there to get people to follow them? They’re feasting on the most susceptible souls—the very ones we should be protecting from drifting into this web.
Aura Farming. Can there be anything that screams “vanity” more? Curating the perfect image, the perfect vibe. Measuring, comparing, polishing every angle to stand out or appear enviable.
Self-serving. Self-absorbed. What may seem alive on the outside often stands hollow within. Soulless.
Biohack. But wait! There is something that screams “vanity” even more! Obsessing over having the perfect body, the brightest mind, outperforming everyone — and going to whatever means necessary to bio-engineer our new images.
Self-serving. Self-consuming. Empty.
Put all three together — rage bait, aura farming, biohacking — and what do we get?
A culture of the living dead.
People moving, working, scrolling, optimizing…
but spiritually empty.
Busy, but untouched by grace.
Connected, but starved of communion.
We’ve become animated, but not alive.
It’s movement without the Spirit.
Just words… with no breath of life in them.
Scripture doesn’t mince words here.
It calls this condition what it is:
“You were dead in your trespasses…”
(Ephesians 2:1)
Not “struggling.”
Not “a little off track.”
Dead.
And dead things can’t revive themselves.
They can shuffle.
They can imitate life.
They can feed on others to keep going.
But they can’t breathe.
Only God can make us truly alive.
As Paul reminds us a few verses later, we are made alive together with Christ by His mercy and grace (Eph 2:4–5).
Not through self-optimization, curated images, or cult followings generated by outrage.
Not by feeding ourselves with empty distraction.
Only Christ breathes true life into what is spiritually dead.
Remember Ezekiel 37? God takes Ezekiel to a valley full of dry bones. The bones rattle and come together. They even stand on their feet. But they are still lifeless — still corpses — until God breathes His Spirit into them. Only then do they truly live.
That’s the whole point.
Human effort can assemble amazing things —
but only God can animate us with the breath of life.
So how do we fight back against this drift?
Not by retreating from the world.
Not by pretending these currents don’t exist.
But by cutting crosswise through them:
- Guard your attention carefully — because spiritually, your life depends on it.
Your attention is your soul’s airway. What you inhale, you become. - Practice humility.
Nothing cuts against aura farming or bio-hacking more than quiet fidelity to God. - Return to the sacraments.
This is where true communion actually happens. Particularly in the Eucharist. - Anchor yourself in Scripture–the only Word that matters.
Scripture will lead you to the shoreline. Everything else will drag you down in the cross-current. - Recognize the drift for what it is: death masquerading as life.
Once you see it, you will stop following it blindly.
Because here’s the truth beneath all this:
We’re not meant to be zombies, feeding off one another.
We’re meant to be living stones (1 Peter 2:5), building on the eternal.
We’re not meant to be optimized.
We’re meant to be reborn.
We’re not meant to be seen.
We’re meant to be known.
We’re not meant to merely move.
We’re meant to live.
Fully.
Awake.
Alive in Christ.
