So what was your breaking point this summer that made you go full crash out?
Maybe it was yet another piece of bad news on reproductive rights, like the report this week that the US government, under the Trump administration, is destroying $9.7 million worth of contraceptives. Or the fact that it’s significantly more difficult to get a COVID vaccine thanks to our “MAHA” head of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. It’s harder to protect ourselves and our kids from the novel virus that upended all our lives a mere five years ago, but hey, at least we have cane sugar in our Coca Cola products!
The latest political news is just the tip of the iceberg, though. The truth is, 2025 has been an anger-inducing experience for so many people that a simmering rage has been building all year. Now, in the midst of a blistering hot summer that’s poised to be one of the warmest on record, we are kind of losing it. The girls are collectively crashing out.
Sure, the summer’s biggest pop-culture phenomenon, Love Island, gave us all something fun to talk about, but even that has been tinged with a level of rage. The show’s couplings and drama has led to ever-escalating online disputes due to “nasty and toxic” and “parasocial fan behavior,” as Rolling Stone put it, describing social media posts about the dating show’s finale as “exhausted, delirious, and even angry.”
In fact, fan infighting over the couples (Team Jeremiah versus Team Conrad) from The Summer I Turned Pretty has gotten so bad online that Amazon Prime urged viewers on its official social media accounts to keep its fictional island haven, Cousins Beach, our “safe place.”
“Everything good, everything magical,” it reads. “Let’s keep the conversation kind this summer.”
I gotta say, I feel like something else other than an impassioned obsession and love for “Jelly” is going on here. It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that people are using the phrase “crashing out” to describe their emotional state with increasing frequency online.
The term isn’t new: It originated in AAVE, or African American Vernacular English, and began to grow in popularity after being used in a 2017 song by Louisiana-based rapper NBA Young Boy, according to KnowYourMeme. But though it actually refers to someone who is a “reckless individual who seeks altercations,” according to the website, more and more people are using it this summer to describe reaching their breaking point (or frankly, losing their shit).
In one video from this week, for example, TikToker Rachel Lapointe posted herself “crashing out” over the latest Trump denial over Epstein, repeating his comment “I never had the privilege of going to Epstein’s island” over and over again with increasing rage.
“I have lived one thousand years in the decade since he entered American politics,” she wrote.
