Tracking Ourselves to Death

Spotify Wrapped and Transcription Failure

It’s only December 2, but I open Instagram and people are already sharing their 2025 Spotify Wrapped data. Crap. I speedily navigate to Apple Music to look at my results, and the feeling is akin to looking up AP test scores. I wait for it to load, electricity crackling in my chest. Okay, here it is. My top artist of 2025, for the third year running, is… Taylor Swift. Wait. This has to be a mistake. I only listened to The Life of a Showgirl one time through. I only ever listen to folklore and evermore, and cherry-pick my favorite Red songs to soundtrack fall. No, no, no. I thought I was more careful. My taste is far more esoteric than this. I’m so much more cultured, so much more interesting. I feel myself getting dragged by my arms by the taste police, my legs kicking. “Please, stop!! It’s not what it looks like!” I cry, as they lock me up and throw away the key. “Just give me a second chance!! Look at the rest of the artists in my Top 5!!”

I glance at the other artists in my Top 5, and it gets worse. Number two is Role Model. I scrunch up my nose. Number three is The Marías. Better! Number four is Beyoncé, and number five is Lorde. Not amazing, but not terrible either. Squarely in the middle tier of pop fans. Not a complete social pariah (I’ve never listened to a Morgan Wallen song, I can’t conjure an image of Alex Warren or Nessa Barrett), but not a generational tastemaker either. Fortunately, my top albums and top songs are much more palatable. There isn’t a single Taylor Swift song in my Top 100 songs of the year, leading me to think she slipped Apple Music some cash under the table.

I can’t not share my top artists with my friends though. I don’t want to disengage from what’s become an invaluable community-building activity. A marker of time passage, of the year’s end. And besides, they know the real me. They know that I don’t listen to Taylor Swift or Role Model in the way that everyone else does.

Except that I totally do. When I’m driving around my hometown with my sisters, I’m shuffling Taylor Swift’s discography and screeching all the words by heart, swerving in and out of the lanes on the freeway. And I’m doing the same thing when I’m missing my sisters and sorting emails on a Monday morning in Los Angeles. I tried to turn my nose up to Kansas Anymore, Role Model’s country-pop sophomore album, but I was neither immune to the record’s crooning melodies nor the real-life heartbreak inspiring the songs. I can’t help but stick my nose into a story.

Many I follow online have abstained from sharing their Spotify Wrapped data this year, positing that Spotify is an evil company that underpays its artists, homogenizes listener taste via algorithms, and lines the pockets of a CEO who invests in AI weapons companies. Many more have shared their Wrapped profiles though because this type of data - collected and sorted by ourselves in tandem with various behavior-tracking apps - is one of the few immediate windows we have into our psyche. A complementary kind of psychoanalysis, a palm reading. Spotify, Goodreads, Letterboxd, Beli, Strava. Jotting down what we’re reading, watching, eating, and doing to remember, to find patterns, and ultimately to clarify who we are and what we like, in a world that’s overselling itself to us.

Seeing yourself accurately reflected in your listening habits - or reading habits, or watching habits, or eating habits, etc. - is always a relief, like reviewing a burst of photos of yourself and seeing your likeness well-captured. Or sliding on a denim jacket that is so absolutely your sense of style that you can’t put it into words. Transcription is my greatest challenge, as a writer and as a person. Taking the jumbled-up impulses and desires and translating them via language. These tracking apps promise expedited transcription. This is what you liked this year, this is who you were, they insist, lips wet, sharp teeth exposed.

The apps are getting better, but they never transcribe us completely accurately, crowning us with new monikers, like “listening ages,” to share and circulate amongst ourselves. We assume that conclusions can be drawn from the data. All of this effort to collect, process, and store it must have some payoff. But the apps’ interpretations are often lazy or incomplete, either intentionally vague to imply universality or unknowingly off-base. The greatest lapse always exists between what’s written and what we wish we were reading. Who we are and who we want to be. What we meant to write.

When I’m twiddling my thumbs in between family activities over the holidays, my screen time reaches record heights. After growing dizzy seeing the usual material on the usual apps, scraping the bottom of the barrel of each one, I always make my way to my high school “finsta” or “spam” account on Instagram. Followed by maybe fifteen people while active, my finsta may be the clearest window into my subconscious at a given time. Though it’s undoubtedly stylized - aiming to emulate the tone of an irreverent, pseudo-cerebral Twitter celebrity - it might be the closest thing I have to a pure brain dump.

Scrolling through the grid of my high school finsta is like flipping through the pages of an old diary, worn and yellowed with age. It strangely feels like I’m in some kind of dialogue with myself, a hand - or, rather, a thumb - reaching backwards in time, offering a double-tap or a comment laden with jumbled-up letters on a keyboard, connoting laughter - the highest honor a finsta-author can receive. Time never feels more like a flat circle than when I’m scrolling through the crying selfies. The screenshots of music I still listen to. The photos of celebrities I’m still obsessed with, alongside brain-rotted reaction images. Memes alongside dire, comical cries in the caption. A photo I likely stole from Twitter of an SAT Admission Ticket. The photo in the Admission Ticket is a front-camera selfie held down low with the familiar Snapchat bar across it, reading “streaks” alongside the pink double heart emoji. Hilarious. My caption: “My life is in shambles skjdfhaskfdhas.” What could have been causing my life to be “in shambles” at seventeen is beyond me at this point. It clearly wasn’t so bad that I couldn’t post about it.

Some finsta gems

It’s a relief to thumb through the archives and remember that I’ve always kind of been myself. Who I am today isn’t some cataclysmic accident. Not some kind of chemical mishap in a lab, an inept scientist mixing the wrong beakers and birthing a Frankensteinian creature. It’s satisfying to find order in this way, trace a flower through its stem, through its roots, back to the seed. I’ve always been a person who likes to write, dance ballet, and listen to emotional pop music sung by girls. Other elements have changed, but in essence, it all kind of comes back to those things.

There are times when high school feels lightyears away, like I’ve left this girl with the finsta behind. Not because I don’t want to bring her with me, but because time keeps trudging on, and I do my best to trudge on with it. I had a moment like this last week, when I attended an event I was invited to as a writer. Before this, I hadn’t been invited to an event as anything other than a friend, relative, student, or coworker. All of those titles are fine and good, but “writer” is the one that I’ve really been chasing this whole time, scampering through the woods with a butterfly net, wondering if it’ll ever enter my orbit.

Not only did I feel like I cheated my way into getting invited to this event, I also felt like I cheated my way into bringing my friend as a plus one. She and I walked up this winding driveway to this house in Laurel Canyon, expecting a couple of Manson girls to pop out of the bushes and slit our throats. The music softly emanating from the outdoor speakers sounded like the soundtrack to a beachside resort in Tulum. We entered the house’s cacophonous foyer, stylishly curved and lined with mosaic tiles, and instantly saw several pop singers, including one who had a heavy presence in our respective Spotify Wrapped/Apple Music Replay data.

I wondered if anyone here presently had holes in their socks or had ever spilt an entire glass of red wine on their linen pants before. If either of those things were true, it didn’t show. The lapse between data and transcription couldn’t feel greater as I uploaded all the sensory info, everyone moving around the room easily, gliding in and out of conversation, up and down off the sofa. Hair well-quaffed or straggly in the right way, smiles given generously or chicly restrained. None of that could have been the whole story.

We aren’t wholly the faces we show at parties, nor are we the faces we reserve for private. Neither the music on our Wrapped playlists nor the music on our finsta. We are effectively some confusing combination of all of it that often defies meaningful interpretation. Excessive data-collection - on our part, and on the part of the apps - can feel like surveillance; maybe there’s more sense to glean from just being. Maybe we won’t forget ourselves if we don’t write it down.

I try my best to keep cool the rest of the evening, attempting to uphold the interpretation that I am who I think I am. I end up in conversation with one of the pop singers I listen to a lot. My Apple Music data in the flesh and bone. I congratulate her on the great year she’s had, and she tells me she’s heard of my newsletter. I shake my head and tell her there’s no way she has. But who knows?

The next day, I skim through the Google Drive with pictures from the party and see the crack in my facade. A black and white flash image of my friend and me. I’m smiling with a thousand and one teeth, clearly ecstatic to be where I am - the antithesis of cool. Thrilled to be a small fish in a big pond. Once again, still kind of myself, against all odds. I wasn’t fooling anyone.

---