Confused, befuddled and exhausted by the events of the past 12 months? Let MR PORTER try and explain it all to you… .

When the countdown to midnight reaches zero, how will you reflect on the past 12 months? There are the obvious areas to ponder: the personal, the geopolitical, the headline-grabbing actions of whichever celebrities were particularly famous this year. But what about the little things that give a year its flavour? More importantly, in this fast-paced, 99 per cent meme-driven popular culture of ours, what about all the things you missed, or failed to understand? To ease you out of this most turbulent of years, MR PORTER has compiled the following round-up of a few key terms, ideas and events that you should probably be aware of. From the revenge of the nerds to the new public enemy number one, here is 2015 (sort of) in six short paragraphs.

For a magical week towards the end of April, every man on the wrong side of 30 with a lapsed gym membership thought they’d hit paydirt. In a textbook example of the global media more or less inventing a lifestyle trend because they can, it was briefly decreed everywhere from The Times to The Washington Post that what women really wanted were not chiselled Mr David Gandy-esque Adonises so much as guys who looked like they could stunt double for Mr Seth Rogen. The rationale was that rock-hard pecs and six-packs actually seemed kind of intimidating and/ or neurotic compared to the soft-but-strong physique of a Sunday league centre back. Plus, at the time, there were some photos knocking about of Mr Leonardo DiCaprio in his trunks looking a bit cuddly, which was more than enough evidence that the “dad bod” was officially a thing. Only, of course, it wasn’t. By September 2015, when Instagram comedian Mr Josh Ostrovsky (aka @thefatjewish) mounted a “dad bod” runway show at New York fashion week (generously panned by the press), the joke seemed to have worn a little thin. And everyone was still flexing their #muscles on Instagram. Sigh.

In years to come, we will have to explain to our children that there was a time when adults who had a passion for things such as dragons, zombies and superheroes were considered laughable losers. Our children will look at us with confused expressions and ask us why, and we will then have to go into the whole story of how once upon a time not every single aspect of popular culture revolved around science fiction or fantasy or dystopic near-futures. They will gasp and demand to know when everything changed, at which stage you will cite the year 2015 as the tipping point. So for example, according to data supplied by Facebook, there was not a TV show talked about more on the social networking site this year than Game of Thrones (dragons) or The Walking Dead (zombies). The Marvel comics juggernaut – superheroes – performed a pincer movement on popular culture this year, swarming both the box office (Avengers: Age of Ultron, Ant-Man, Fantastic Four) and the small screen (Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D). This comic-book guy fantasy is set to last for years and we’ve not even got round to Star Wars: The Force Awakens or the fact that this year saw the global video game market tipped to grow by almost 10 per cent. Your days of pretending that you never played Dungeons & Dragons are well and truly over.

Once merely objects of gentle derision from Brooklyn to Berlin, the past 12 months saw hipsters morph into modern day folk devils. When, in September, anti-gentrification protesters attacked London’s Cereal Killer Café a Shoreditch eatery that sells bowls of kitsch retro cereal at up to £4.40 a pop – it only seemed to underline this shift in attitudes. Why the change? It would be great to cite some great, sweeping, complex piece of cultural theory at this point, but really, the truth is that everyone just got absolutely sick of them. The beards. The bikes. The flat whites… you suddenly realised you were dealing with identikit caricatures, uniform and conservative in their tastes yet blithely self-important with it. We make allowances for annoying people who are actually quite cool, but annoying people who think they’re Mr James Dean for drinking IPA? No chance. “Hipster”, rightly, is now a hate word.

What do you get when you combine the limitless narcissism of millennials with modern video-streaming technology and an audience of smartphone-enabled tweenagers who will watch absolutely anything? The answer, I’m afraid, is the YouTuber – a new model for stardom that fully cemented itself in the public psyche this year when a 26-year-old Swedish guy called Mr Felix Kjellberg (aka PewDiePie – he films himself playing video games, see point 02 above), became the first person to hit 10 billion views online. How did we get here? In brief, there exists today a booming number of clean-cut, relentlessly cheery twentysomethings whose only real talent is that they are able to talk about nothing forever. They film themselves doing this – monologuing, emoting, engaging in attention-seeking “challenges”  – and post the results online every day, where they attract millions and millions of views and, topped-up by book deals and brand-endorsements, millions and millions of whatever their favourite currency is. Spend 30 minutes watching the output of YouTube superstars such as Mr Alfie Deyes or Ms Zoe “Zoella” Sugg (whose books Girl Online and Girl Online: On Tour are both currently in Amazon UK’s top 100 bestsellers) and you’ll genuinely start to toy with the idea of cancelling your broadband.

At first, it seemed like a nice idea. In June, to coincide with a US Supreme Court Decision that cleared the way for same-sex marriage in the US, Facebook allowed you to superimpose a rainbow flag over your profile picture. Click. Drag. Done. Only, then it started to get complicated. How long were you expected to keep your profile photo like that? What message did it send if you reverted back to your original pic after a few days? Or a few weeks? Suddenly, you were in a tense Mexican standoff with your friends. Would your personal brand be tarnished by the suggestion of uncaring callousness if you switched too soon? Or if you didn’t change it for months, would people think that you were somehow cheapening the original sentiment? So many questions. So few answers.

Of all the various subcultures Britain has been responsible for over the years, “lad culture” – which is sort of the equivalent of American “bro culture” – never seemed destined for export. It is, by its very nature, parochial, hyper-masculine and sustained by a hive mind of young men who value above all things banter, lager and the kind of affectionately violent pranks that make for hilarious Vine loops. And yet, in 2015, one pillar of lad culture made an unlikely break for the mainstream. Witness the “cheeky Nando’s” meme, an ironic tribute to the catchphrase of many a British lad. What’s “Nando’s”? Why, it’s a grilled chicken-selling high-street chain favoured by British lads. Why is it “cheeky”? Because, in lad culture, that’s how you describe anything that is impromptu but enjoyable. The meme – which featured everyone from Jesus to Hitler declaring that they fancied a cheeky Nando’s – provided one of those rare moments when Americans actually needed an aspect of web culture explained to them, but the upshot is that there are now kids in the Midwest joking about Nando’s and appropriating the word “cheeky”. It’s been quite a year.