Trend Longevity Rating
became core infrastructure in health care, often bigger than the book imagined
How this trend held up
Peer support communities like the ones the book profiles (Postpartum Progress, Crohnology, Smart Patients) proliferated across Reddit, Facebook groups, and dedicated platforms through the 2010s. But the biggest development the book didn't foresee is that virtual counseling would eventually be delivered by AI rather than only by peers — mental-health chatbots and general-purpose AI assistants became a widely used, and increasingly controversial, source of emotional support by the mid-2020s, prompting new safety concerns (including wrongful-death lawsuits tied to AI chatbot conversations in 2024–2025) that a book about human-to-human peer support had no way to anticipate.
Every past trend prediction is re-reviewed and graded with a Trend Longevity Rating, measuring how much each originally curated trend still matters years later.
