denial
the first thing you do is refresh. maybe the data is stuck. maybe the app is glitching. maybe if i close it and open it six more times my top artist will morph from whoever this is into someone i actually respect.
the screen does not change. the screen has never been more certain of anything. apparently i streamed 4,000 minutes of lo-fi hip hop radio ... beats to relax/study to. i do not remember doing this. i remember one tuesday in march when i left it on for my cat while i went to the grocery store. the algorithm counted that. the algorithm counted that as who i am.
denial sounds like: "this is wrong. this is a bug. they sent me someone else's wrapped." but you know, deep down, they didn't. the data doesn't lie. the data just doesn't understand context, or shame, or the fact that you were going through something in april and that something was apparently sea shanties.
anger
and now you're mad at an app. a free app. an app that spent all year serving you exactly what you asked for and you're furious because it remembered.
anger sounds like: "why would you air this out in december, spotify, the month of judgment and family gatherings and people asking what you've been up to." my wrapped looks like a psychological profile assembled by someone who hates me. my top genre is "pov: indie." what does that even mean. whose pov. not mine.
the worst part is the genre names spotify invents just for you. you get "cinematic post-rock" and your friend gets "hyperpop" like a cool person and you're standing there with "adult standards" because you let one frank sinatra song finish and now spotify thinks you pay taxes voluntarily.
bargaining
this is the stage where you start explaining your wrapped to people who didn't ask. "okay so the reason taylor swift is in my top five is because my niece used my account one weekend." you are lying. your niece is three and doesn't know how to use a phone.
bargaining sounds like: "if i listen to better music starting right now, january through october, heavily weighted toward the kind of person i want to be seen as, maybe next year's wrapped won't humiliate me publicly." you make a playlist called "redemption arc." you put four songs on it. you forget it exists by january 3rd.
the trap of bargaining is believing you can outsmart the algorithm. you can't. the algorithm already knows you listen to "dreams" by fleetwood mac on a three-hour loop when you're sad and that you never, ever skip it. it has receipts you forgot existed.
depression
this is the quiet part. the part where you stop showing people your wrapped and just sit with it. maybe the algorithm does know you. maybe the version of yourself you present to the world and the version that selects "play similar" at 11pm on a tuesday are two different people, and the second one is the one spotify has been taking notes on.
depression sounds like staring at "audio aura" and seeing words like "sad" and "boastful" and "soft" all at once and realizing... yeah. yeah that tracks. the machine compiled 47,000 minutes of your private little choices and handed back a diagnosis. you can't even argue with it because the data is technically accurate. you just don't want it to be.
you scroll down. your listening personality is "time traveler." you look up what the other personality types are. you got the one for people who replay the same comfort songs from five years ago instead of discovering anything new. spotify didn't just show you what you listened to. spotify showed you that you are emotionally stuck.
acceptance
and then, somewhere around mid-december, you stop caring. you realize something that should have been obvious in stage one: nobody else is looking at your wrapped as hard as you are. everyone is too busy being horrified by their own.
acceptance sounds like leaving the lo-fi station on for your cat again, on purpose this time. it sounds like admitting that yes, i did stream one song 87 times in a single day and yes it was a song from a show for children and no i will not be identifying it further. it sounds like closing the app and putting on the playlist that brought you here and letting it play.
the algorithm isn't your identity. it's just a mirror. sometimes the mirror catches you at a bad angle, sometimes it catches you loving something uncool, sometimes it catches you exactly as you are ... someone who needed the same song 87 times in a row and found it, and that alone is worth the embarrassment.
plus, wrapped resets in january. you have eleven months to curate a whole new crisis.