At this time of year, stepping into social media yields one of a few selected landmines:
[1] The family snap laced up with best wishes to all followers with a promise to take some time off to recharge followed by the menace to see you on the other side;
[2] The individual selfie on the backdrop of some beach with an inspirational quote followed by thank you life; could be a shot taken in August, could be now, not relevant;
[3] The now exhaustingly ubiquitous year wrapped, indebted to bloody Spotify which launched it back in 2016, a good sixteen years after I started my very own Year in Numbers, except I used to write it in my own diary and never showed it to anyone.
Now, in very recent times The New Yorker eviscerated Spotify wrapped [article here, behind a paywall] with a pick and an axe. Whilst the article centred on the narcissistic element of it, its undercurrent presenting us with an equivalent of the look at me selfie except with data, it also zoomed into the wrapped thing having now permeated every service provider from banks [see your year in Monzo is here] to printing businesses [see your Papier yearbook is here]. Whilst one is marginally more user-centric, for I do acknowledge that my spending habits surely are my own, except my bank loves to have a nosey and present it as something to relish, the other is simply business provider-centric, for I do think that Papier having reached the milestone of 1 million sold diaries may well be very nice for Papier but is only likely to be saved in the Things I Don’t Give a Fuck About folder of my filing cabinet.
In fact, I would go as far as suggesting that there is a certain hubris in telling your customers your wins particularly at holiday time. Nothing sends me to the UNSUBSCRIBE button faster than an assault of marketing dross at Christmas time, particularly one that has zero relevance to my life.
Naturally, what was once merely a marketing ploy has now become a way to show off the most irrelevant dross in existence. Would you care to know what song I most listened to this year? Of course you wouldn’t, it has as much relevance to your life as how many bottles of bleach I’ve got under the kitchen sink.
Would you care to know that someone you follow on LinkedIn posted x times, commented y times, got reposted z times and their three keywords were whatever whatever whatever? Of course not. I know that you may have had a look but that’s because it is now impossible to have an online browse without stepping on this particular digital turd. But few things are more brain-cell-destroying and morale-sapping than the constant LOOK AT ME AND WHAT I HAVE ACHIEVED particularly when the only thing these snapshots do is wrapping ridiculous non-achievements as successes. Streaming Blossoms 55m times really isn’t an achievement [I made that up by the way]. Getting your posts reposted on LinkedIn 200 times is also not an achievement.
Before you jump up and roll yours eyes whilst spitting COME ON STEPH it’s just a bit of fun… I get it dear reader. I get the fun element. I looked at my Deezer wrapped myself [Deezer being a competitor of Spotify, which I feel the need to clarify as, apparently, many people don’t even know it exists]. But what gives me reasons to think is not the fact that data and analytics exist and can be fun [I developed a number of dashboards through the years and those wrapped things are data extrapolated from dashboards and made pretty] but rather the underlining psychological push and need to share it. All people are doing is advertising companies for free in yet another example of creating a dependency without satisfying a need [of which socials are full to the hilt].
All of this leads me very nicely to what I would hope for those immensely privileged parts of the world not currently devastated by war or famine or natural disasters which is to create more. Go write, paint, draw, make movies, teach yourself animation, teach yourself how to sculpt wood or make ceramics, read books, create a tarot deck, weave a scarf, crochet a bag, knit a pair of socks [warning: this is difficult]. And then at the end of 2025 you will have a mountain of actual things yielded from a string of different processes and your year wrapped will unwrap satisfaction and joy and a real sense of real achievement looking at all of the things that did not exist today and that will a year from now. Beats staring into a black hole of nothing only good to the companies that spew it back at you.