It seems like everything has a “your year in review!” thing these days. Sure, I get it as far as Spotify is concerned, since they’re all about music and basically stealing from musicians, and having all of that data is a great way to generate some buzz and attention to your platform, even though they share the data before the year is over and don’t include your entire year’s worth of listening. Nintendo started doing the same thing, but with video games, showing the number of games you played and how much you played them. My podcatcher app (Podcast Addict) doesn’t have one, but it does compile your stats in a menu somewhere so you can look any time you want rather than needing to wait for the end of the year. Amazon has one, if you use any of its media services. Barnes and Noble even sent me some kind of email about it that I instantly deleted. I don’t want to know how much money I spent on books this year since I know precisely how many books I actually read and the disparity would probably make me sad, especially after I was finally able to get myself back into a place where the quiet I needed for reading was within my grasp again. Honestly, the only services that don’t seem to do this kind of year-end review are social media companies, which I really appreciate since I would hate to see just how much I posted and how little interaction I got.

When it comes to some of the original sources for this sort of review (newspapers, magazines covering current events, etc), it makes a bit of sense. A year is a long time and, as we’ve seen in pretty much every year since 2015, some years are just so jam-packed with events that you forget about some things (some of which you probably tried to forget) and those news sources are there to remind you. Not all of them are dour or dreary, though. There’s plenty of “cutest dogs of 20XX” type things around, and I’m sure some of those newspapers and magazines even have some positive “top moments of” type things. Sports broadcasts are notorious for them. They’ve been changing, though, over the last decade or two. Where they were once more detailed, talking about the event and sort of catching the reader or viewer up on something they might have missed, now they read more like listicles or look more like compilation videos. After all, with the advent of social media and the growing use of the internet, everyone’s already seen those things at least once. No one who might go looking for “year in review” media misses any major viral moment. It eventually reaches every corner of the internet, so anyone who spends any amount of time online will have seen it and, these days, pretty much everyone spends a lot of time online.

Honestly, as interesting as this data is (and I LOVE me some data), it really feels like most of it exists to be placed on social media. Sure, Spotify Wrapped is famous for its graphics and presenting your data in a fun way, but it’s not really doing it to inform you. It’s doing it so you’ve got something to post on whatever social media site you frequent. Which is fine. I’m not yet so curmudgeonly that I’d say that posting things on social media or that things made specifically to be posted on social media are bad. I just think its interesting that all of this data is collected, packaged in fun wrappings, and delivered to users in a way that make it incredibly tempting and unthinkingly easy to post it to facebook or twitter or wherever you’re posting things now that twitter is more of a shithole than its ever been. It sure doesn’t hurt that it is incredibly rewarding to share this stuff in the way that most social media engagement is. Everyone loves a Year In Review or Spotify Wrapped and those posts tend to do really well since everyone is sharing them around the same time. It becomes a community event of sorts, as everyone shares and reacts to each others’ posts, everyone comparing their top tracks, most-listened-to artists, most-played-games, and so on.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot because I really don’t feel like any of my Year-In-Reviews actually capture the year I had. The music I listened to has fluctuated more than ever as I’ve desperately hunted for something new to listen to in order to prevent myself from feeling stagnant while also keeping old favorites in heavy rotation in order to provide comfort or catharsis. The games I played reflect moments in my year more than my general gaming habits since the almost three hundred hours of The Legend of Zelda (split into 3/5 Tears of the Kingdom and 2/5 Breath of the Wild) reflect my April and May as being moments of desperate, exhausted escapism into something familiar and comforting more than the way I usually play games and my two hundred hours of Baldur’s Gate 3 reflect my need to avoid thinking about literally anything happening in my life during August and September, two miserable months from this past year. Those four months, (April, May, August, and September) represent more than half of the time I’ve spent playing video games and represent my poor mental health following the unending stress (and sometimes fun) of the five months prior to my decision to stream myself playing the entirety of Breath of the Wild before Tears of the Kingdom came out. I was incredibly fragile this year and fell into some unfortunate but necessary coping mechanisms as a result.

I guess I’m just not really enjoying my year in review because I don’t really care much for the year I had. Sure, some parts where pretty great, like my trip to Spain and being a part of two different weddings involving some of my closest friends, but it’s a lot easier to mention the parts I enjoyed in a sentence or two than all the unfortunate stuff that filled the rest of the year. It’s a net-negative year, despite the bright, shining moments that were a part of that calculation. I wish I could make any argument against this assessment (I’ve been thinking about this for days already and I’ve come up blank every time), but it really was just a difficult and largely unpleasant year. I’m ready for it to be over, even if next year isn’t necessarily looking any better. I mean, I hope a rest at the end of this year will help start things off on the right foot for next year, but there’s already a couple big events coming in 2024 that I’m dreading and I’ll spare us all the spiral talking about them explicitly would cause by wrapping up my post here. After all, what’s the point of having a year in review if you’re not going to enjoy it or at least learn something from it?