2023 as seen through TikTok: every trend that shaped our lives this year

There is no telling what will grip the increasingly ephemeral attention of the internet. Experts do their best to predict it, brands make an effort to plan for it, people wearing suits in boardrooms point at line graphs, attempting with all their might to "forecast" it. But years of social media training and weeks of planning go straight out of the window when suddenly, inexplicably, a CGI-ed pig-man hybrid becomes the biggest influencer on TikTok.

That's the reality of the strange app that has come to define our online culture over the past few years. We are completely at the mercy of TikTok, and if Gen Z's scrolling habits are as weird as our 2007 internet searches, why did we ever expect the trends to be normal? This year we've traversed millennia, from 2023 being designated "year of the girl" to a trend which took us back to 31 BC with the Roman Empire. We've gone high