There are few holidays that are anticipated with as much excitement as Spotify Wrapped Day. People wait with bated breath to see their top artist, their favorite genre or what tarot card they will receive based on their listening habits. We all fall victim to it, to the debate of which slide we should share on social media, whether it correctly shows the persona we’ve been attempting to perfect (and hoping that one night when we listened to “My Heart Will Go On” on repeat won’t show up).
It’s a habit that we as a society just can’t kick: tracking. We all know that most of our internet activity is tracked; how else would my computer know I texted my mom about needing toothpaste? But, for some reason, we decided we needed to track everything else. What we read and watch, how long our runs are and, of course, our music. And it’s not enough just to track it; we have to share it. Everyone must know our review of the most recent “Indiana Jones” movie. They have to see our reading goal for the year, and what would they do without knowing our mile time? It’s inescapable.
Not to say I am not a victim of this — I am among those addicted to a multicolored pie chart detailing my habits for the past year, and I’m just as nosy as anyone else. There’s nothing quite like seeing someone’s Wrapped and wondering why their most listened-to artists are Frank Sinatra and Olivia Rodrigo. There’s a sense of wonder that you get a peek into their lives.
Except this is where the issue starts. If we’re tracking and sharing everything we do, we stop doing it for ourselves. If every song we queue up may alter our perfectly curated Wrapped, then why listen to it at all? If we want to be seen as intellectuals, our Goodreads can’t show our addiction to the “Divergent” series. If we worry about the ratio of our movie ratings too much, we stop watching. We’ve somehow managed to commodify our personalities, and we’ve lost our enjoyment.
This isn’t an argument to stop using apps like Spotify or Letterboxd. There’s nothing inherently wrong with keeping track of what you consume. And it’s perfectly fine to share it with your friends and to want to see theirs. But it’s important to remember that you don’t have Spotify to see data, you have Spotify to listen to music; you use Goodreads to remember how much you enjoyed a book. These services are meant to uplift our interactions with media, not stunt them.
It’s been tough to apply these ideas I can so easily type into my actions. There’s a constant pressure that comes with being alive in our age of social media and interconnectedness. I can speak to people across the ocean with a few clicks, I can see a photo or video of anything I want and any question I have can be answered easily. Yet, on the flip side, everyone can contact me whenever they want, I never get a moment of silence and I can’t escape anything because it’s always in my back pocket. And if I try to distract myself in the ways humans have done for millennia, suddenly that’s taken from me, too. The world can’t know I’m reading a cheesy romance book, the world can’t know I’m still listening to “Dear Evan Hansen.” What if my old friend from elementary school judges my favorite movie? I can see everything, but it can also see me.
Yet, the everything doesn’t actually care what I read. The vast unendingness of our world is not focused on my favorite song of the week. No one is actually looking as much as we think they are. Despite the invisible strings connecting us, we can still be in our little world. We can still shut off the news alerts and ignore the messages; we can go outside and be alone or together and do whatever we want.
I guess this rambling story is less something others needed to hear than something I needed to hear. But I’ll share it anyway. Listen to that song, read that book, watch that movie. Track it or don’t; share it or hide it under your bed. Allow yourself to fully experience the world without fear of its perception of you. Because, when you really think about it, do you remember anyone’s Wrapped but your own?
Nora Malone, FCRH ’27, is a medieval studies major from Alexandria, Va.
