It arrived in early December like a highly judgmental horoscope from a Silicon Valley oracle.

Spotify Wrapped.

The screen exploded with gradients. My phone began aggressively congratulating me for behaviours I should probably discuss privately with a licensed professional. Apparently, I had spent 14,382 minutes listening to music this year, which sounds less like a hobby and more like I accidentally worked a part-time job emotionally deteriorating in headphones.

Then came the diagnosis.

"Your music aura is: Melancholy Goblin Autumn."

First of all, what does that mean? What specific emotional condition requires the soundtrack of a medieval creature standing alone in a damp forest holding a candle?

I continued clicking through the slides, with mounting dread, like a patient reading their own MRI scan. Spotify informed me that my top song was one I distinctly remember listening to during an extremely minor emotional inconvenience in February. Apparently, my brain responded to one cloudy afternoon and a slightly disappointing sandwich by playing the same haunting ballad 417 consecutive times like a Victorian woman dying of tuberculosis near a window.

And suddenly, my entire personality had been statistically flattened into data visualisation.

I was no longer a complicated human being with contradictory thoughts and emotional depth. I was merely “someone who played one sad song enough times to alarm an algorithm.”

To understand the profound humiliation of Spotify Wrapped, we must turn to the German philosopher Theodor Adorno, who would have absolutely hated this app with the intensity of a medieval priest confronting a vape.

Adorno, writing alongside Max Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment, argued that modern capitalism transforms culture into industry. Art stops being something wild, difficult, or transcendent and instead becomes mass-produced emotional wallpaper designed for passive consumption.

He called this system The Culture Industry.

According to Adorno, popular culture gives us the comforting illusion of individuality while secretly standardising all of us into identical consumers. We believe our tastes are deeply personal expressions of the soul, but in reality, we are mostly choosing between slightly different versions of the same product.

Spotify Wrapped is the final horrifying evolution of Adorno’s nightmare because it doesn't merely standardise your taste. It transforms your personality into a cheerful annual performance review.

The app speaks to you with the tone of an encouraging kindergarten teacher:
"You were in the top 0.5% of listeners!"

Excuse me?

Top 0.5% of what exactly? Emotional endurance? Avoidance coping mechanisms?

The app gently suggests that my inability to stop replaying the same melancholic synthesiser track for six consecutive months does not make me socially maladjusted or fundamentally incapable of coping with silence. No, no. It means I am different. A rare soul. An outsider. A mysterious cinematic entity standing alone at a train station in the rain.

"Wow," the app whispers. "You listened to one Norwegian man whisper over ambient fog noises more than anyone else in your city. You are not mentally spiralling. You are curated."

And the truly devastating part is that we immediately believe it.

I think my issue with Spotify Wrapped is that it doesn't just track my listening habits, but it seems to remember me more accurately than I remember myself.

I like to imagine myself as intellectually adventurous. In my internal narrative, I am the sort of person who listens to experimental jazz while reading difficult literature in cafés.

The data strongly disagreed.

The data revealed that, apparently, I spent most of March listening to one synth-heavy song that sounds like a haunted fax machine experiencing heartbreak in Berlin.

Wrapped annihilates all aspirational identity. It exposes the brutal gap between the person you imagine yourself to be and the creature you statistically are.

And there is something uniquely humiliating about seeing your emotional life rendered in infographics. Spotify does not care about the profound context surrounding your listening habits. It reduces every heartbreak, every commute, every dissociative kitchen stare into colourful pie charts and cheerful percentages.

"You listened to sad girl piano music for 63 hours!"

Yes. Thank you. I know. I was there.

Since 1970, we have lost 3 billion birds in North America. Birds like the Snowy Owl are at increasing risk of extinction due to climate change. Birds are vital to healthy ecosystems - and their decline affects us all.

With over a century of conservation expertise, the National Audubon Society knows what it takes to protect the birds we love. And with your support today, we can.

Join us in protecting birds with a dependable, annual gift and we’ll send you our quarterly, award-winning magazine every year as our thanks.

Donate Now.

If human beings use music to construct elaborate narratives about identity, the cat has a significantly more honest relationship with repetitive audio.

Last week, she discovered a bird outside the bedroom window.

Not a particularly interesting bird. Just a small brown bird with the emotional charisma of unsalted rice.

And for the next six hours, she listened to it. The bird chirped exactly one note. Over and over. The same tiny, repetitive sound repeated with the consistency of a microwave malfunction. The cat did not become embarrassed by this repetition. She did not worry that her listening habits lacked sophistication. She did not pause midway through the sixth identical chirp and think, God, I need to diversify my sonic identity.

No. She sat there completely motionless, pupils expanded with the concentration of a religious mystic.

Humans desperately pretend their consumption habits reveal depth. The cat understands something we do not: repetition is not embarrassing if you genuinely enjoy the thing.

She does not require her auditory experiences to become a public-facing personality brand.

She likes one bird.

That is enough.

The most psychologically damaging feature of Spotify Wrapped is not the statistics themselves. It is the demand that we publicly express gratitude to them.

Social media transforms into a yearly ritual of algorithmic self-disclosure. People post obscure bands as if submitting evidence in court that they possess interiority. Suddenly, everyone becomes extremely invested in proving that their taste in music is uniquely strange, emotionally rich, or aesthetically superior.

And yet, beneath all the obscure Icelandic ambient folk playlists and grainy album covers, the reality remains devastatingly simple: Most of us are not cultivating identity. We are just repeatedly pressing play on whatever temporarily makes existing feel slightly less unbearable while standing in supermarkets.

Adorno would probably find this spiritually catastrophic.

See you next time. Keep replaying the song,

Asena

RABBIT HOLE

Every week, I fall down a few rabbit holes. I gather here some insightful things (I don’t promise) I have read, watched, and discovered over the last seven days. If you’re looking for a bit of wonder, click the links below to explore more.

The Beyeren Armorial is a 15th-century manuscript roll featuring 1096 hand-colored coats of arms, accompanied by annotations in Middle Dutch. It’s essentially a "Who's Who" of European nobility, where if you didn't have a red lion or some fancy geometric shapes, you basically didn't exist in the social scene. Carrying one of these around was the medieval version of a verified checkmark; it told everyone you were "legit" without you having to say a word. However, I am not quite sure about the choices and the design process of some.

Check out the rest:

That’s it. You’ve now officially reached the bottom. Thank you for reading. ❤️ Your reward this week is a bridge between a disappointed Victorian headmaster and a bat that’s had way too much espresso.

If this email has been forwarded to you, blame your friend. Then join here →