[Un]reasonably outraged by End-of-Year Brag Season
Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash
December is here, and with it comes twinkling lights, frantic shopping, food prep, and the annual emotional blood sport known (only to me?) as End-of-Year Brag Season.
Yes, that glitter-bombed festival of public achievement where every social platform transforms into a glossy catalogue of other people’s wins.
It starts innocently. One proud parent posts a [my kids is ace] certificate. One author shares a wholesome end-of-year roundup. One Bookstagrammer posts a Top 10 Reads carousel. You double tap because you’re not a monster, you’re totally into clapping when someone has done a great thing and you genuinely love seeing people achieve goals they’ve worked towards. Go them, you think, full of December goodwill and candy cane slice someone brought to the office.
But then the real monster (the algorithm) wakes up, rubs its greedy little hands together, and says, ‘Ohhhh you like achievements? Here have six hundred more!’
Suddenly you're drowning in:
Student of the Year photos
Academic medals
Authors posting 89 festival photos
Friends doing their ‘Career wins of 2025’
Writers announcing multiple-book deals
Someone else celebrating a book-to-film adaptation
Reading totals that require zero life outside of the pages
‘Best Books of the Year’ lists that … surprise! … do not include your book
‘Most Anticipated for 2026’ lists that, shockingly, also do not include your book.
(Note, I did not have a book come out this year, so I cannot be upset about some of these dot points, they are for illustrative purposes only!)
And look, yes, we Australians are notorious tall-poppy snippers. Most of these posts are lovely, earnest celebrations of hard work and I’m thrilled for almost everyone (excluding the smug, arrogant, look-at-me-I-crushed-2025 brigade. You know the ones? They can piss right the way off!).
But there is something uniquely brutal about this concentrated December barrage. The joy is real, but so is the comparison. And comparison hits differently at the end of a long year when you’re stretched thin and just grateful your own children made it to the end of term without another detention. Thankful that you had the time to finish one book on your towering pile.
Before anyone starts sharpening pitchforks, I am not anti-success. Children deserve applause. Authors deserve cake. Bookstagrammers work bloody hard. Creative people need to share what they make. But sometimes those gorgeous, celebratory posts land like little emotional grenades in the feed of someone barely holding their life together.
And there’s no shame in admitting that.
You can be proud of your mate’s kid and feel gutted that your own child didn’t get recognised this year. You can cheer for author friends and feel a sting that your manuscript didn’t get traction. You can celebrate Bookstagrammer joy and wonder how they read 170 books while you barely finished five. You can clap for someone’s international rights deal and quietly mourn that your own inbox is a wasteland of ‘not for us’.
The problem isn’t the celebrating, it’s the timing and intensity.
December is a pressure cooker of fatigue, financial stress, family overload, emotional burnout and unmet expectations.
Onto that we pour the petrol of public achievement. We tell ourselves we’re just scrolling, just catching up, just ‘seeing what people are doing’ while quietly tallying our own perceived failures against other people’s curated wins.
Feeling lesser should not be the way we head into December.
So, if your social media feed is making you feel like you’ve fallen behind in life—or parenting, or publishing, or reading, or career progression—it might be time to step back a little, for your sanity. Not dramatically. Not forever. Just long enough to be reminded that your value is not measured by:
your child’s certificate
your reading count
your publication list
your sales figures
your highlights reel
your algorithmic reach
your December announcement
You are not falling behind or less successful because someone else is loud about their wins.
You do not owe the world a glossy public summary of your year.
And the quiet achievements—the ones that never make it into a caption—matter just as much. Maybe you showed up for your family or you kept going through a tough thing when all you wanted to do was quit. Perhaps you created something amazing and grew in personal ways no one else saw. Could it be simply that you loved your people? Or you literally survived this year?
It all counts.
So celebrate if it feels good, post if it brings you joy, clap loudly for others if you can do it without losing yourself. But if scrolling hurts, if the brag season blitz is crushing your spirit and the comparison fatigue is too heavy, close the app. Let December be soft. Let your year end without the scoreboard. Your worth can be private, quiet, steady. The achievements will still be there, but so will your peace.
And only one of those matters in the long run.
How do you find the end-of-year posts? Join the conversation.
Kylie
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