What Goes Unrecorded?
The parts of your life that you leave untracked
It is, for some, an event marked on the calendar. That day when you unlock your phone, open Instagram, and realise that it is Spotify Wrapped Day.
It’s a ‘company priority’ and a ‘huge business driver’ according to Alex Bodman, Spotify’s Global VP of Creative, who added that the company will ‘continue to push it’. They are no longer alone. Other streaming services launched copycat efforts like Youtube Music Recap or Apple Music Wrapped, eager to hoover up new users or re-engage dormant subscribers that might have seen their friends Wrapped posts.
Exhibiting (or projecting) personality though your enjoyment of a particular type of music is as old as the hills. People enjoy extrapolating some intrinsic quality about themselves from their personal tastes. We see ourselves in the art we enjoy - comparing and entwining our lives with characters, songs, or stories that we love.
When weaponised appropriately, this can build very strong brand loyalty. Last year, Spotify included a ‘Listener Profile’ that analysed your music consumption over the past year before assigning users a Myers-Brigg-style four-letter acronym, complete with a word that summarised your taste as a listener (I am an Explorer, apparently). There can be little doubt that Spotify execs looked at the massing interest in astrology or how people self-identify as an ENFJ or an INFP and thought “could we invent something similar?”
Your Life: Wrapped
Spotify Wrapped broke the mould, or rather recast the mould into something that other brands can replicate at the end of each year - a must-have for your marketing team. You might have noticed copycat efforts by Letterboxd, the social network for cinephiles (entitled Letterboxd Wrapped - not even trying to hide it) and Goodreads - end of year wrap-ups to remind you not only what you did, but also what you missed.
Humans love feedback. When it comes to our tastes - for food, movies, books, music, all of these things and more - we have an insatiable need for external validation; something to tell us that the thing we like is the correct thing to like. There’s a reason why the Michelin Guide or the Oscars guide our consumption - not many of us are particularly bothered thinking for ourselves all the time, but we do want to appear refined or discerning in our tastes. Social media allows us to project these interests to a broader audience resulting in twice the validation - first from consuming a critically-approved product, and then your social circle observing your consumption. It feels good - like queuing a song at a party and knowing that it’ll go down well, that you’ll gain some clout.
These days, our tastes can be quantified and productised like never before - your phone delivers data-driven metrics on exactly how much of an Olivia Rodrigo fan you really are, whether it suits your opinion of yourself or not.
There’s a new kind of FOMO too: we get kind of annoyed when we’re ‘behind’ the arbitrary targets we set for ourselves. You might be aggrieved at yourself if you slide into May only having read two books that year instead of the planned one per month, or feel a sense of vague disappointment seeing your total listening minutes on your Spotify Wrapped. Surely I love music more than that… don’t I?
Tracking personal data is not limited to your music taste, of course. We already have devices that measure our daily lives: think WHOOP Recovery that quantifies your ‘readiness for the day’, Fitbit tracks your steps, sleep, and blood oxygen levels, and the Oura Ring ‘tells you how your body feels’. Shouldn’t I know how my body feels? How long is it before I have a nicely designed graphic delivered each December, telling me How My Body Felt In 2023, or the Top 5 Days I Am Ready For (would I proudly share it on socials if Monday cracked the Top 5?) As cars essentially become large steel IoT devices, will we have Your Driving: Wrapped, telling me I spent 53,212 minutes in traffic this year, or that My Driving Style is an INBP (Impatient, Noisy, Bad Parker)?
Switching Off
I wonder where this line is drawn. What goes unrecorded? What does your phone not track, with or without your consent? And most importantly, what do you do purely for your own enjoyment, without caring about tracking it, quantifying it, or using it as some yardstick of value against others?
One of today’s recs is a profile of probably the greatest living film director, Martin Scorsese, who sees ageing as a process of letting go. He’s read “all of James Joyce (besides Finnegans Wake), all of Tolstoy, all of Melville, all of Dostoevsky” and was “a great collector, a great obsessive glutton for cinema and books” but is in the process of paring down and just existing, instead. Completing lists and checking off experiences is a young person’s game - getting old is a process of realising that you’ll never do it all. To Scorsese, the time you spend - all that time you were watching Married At First Sight instead of reading Foucault, or whatever, “is really spending time… it isn’t wasting time.”
In an interesting critique of ‘The Cool Girl Novelist’, two quotes stood out: Jonathan Franzen’s “readers don’t want a lesson, they want an experience” and Walter Benjamin’s point that novels “are there to be devoured”. I think this principle applies not only to novels, but also to articles, albums, films, and any other entertainment medium, really. We should be hungry to consume and hungry to love the things that entertain us, rather than just hankering to tell other people that we consumed them in the first place. It’s a noble goal to sit and quietly love something - not as some sort of ‘guilty pleasure’ (another marketing term') but because enjoying something for the sake of enjoying it will tell you a hell of a lot more about yourself than any Spotify or Goodreads graphic.
Sometimes, it is nice to move away from optimisation and back to instinct. You can wake up and decide for yourself whether or not you slept badly, without checking an app. You can read a trashy book or a pointless newsletter like this and not track it anywhere. Keeping some score of how you spend your time isn’t living your own life, it’s playing someone else’s game. And life’s a bit too short for that, really.
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Recommended Reading - 2023 Edition #6
Martin Scorsese: “I Have To Find Out Who The Hell I Am.”
Now 80, the legendary director is on one of the most creative runs of his career— and consumed by the challenges (and opportunities) of all that he has left to do.
by Zach Baron in GQ
Read it because: it’s always worth listening to old people talk about the important things in life, and what they think of the dwindling time they have left. It’s particularly worth listening to an old person like Martin Scorsese, who, in addition to making some of the greatest films of all time, has grappled with issues of faith, family, addiction, and much more. My favourite section:
And, yeah, your family dying off. My parents, my brother, pretty much I think anybody who was around—there’s maybe two cousins that are left. This is a family where my mother had seven brothers and sisters. My father had eight brothers and sisters. And so they have children. It’s all gone. It’s all gone. It’s the end of Gangs of New York where they fight in the streets, and then they’re just buried and the grass grows on the graves. And then the buildings come up across the river. And we forgot all those stories about who those people are and all their trouble”
Sinatra’s Song
What is it about Frank Sinatra that no one else can touch? He could swing, break hearts, and behave badly, and he made his voice an instrument that kept reinventing American music
by John Lahr in The New Yorker
Read it because: there are not many stories quite like the odyssey that was the career of Francis Albert Sinatra, the Hoboken boy who took over the world, twice. There are so, so many good stories in this 1997 article, one of which makes feral Swifties seem positively restrained: over six hundred cops were needed to control the crowd at one of Sinatra’s 1940s gigs, and according to Arnold Shaw’s 1968 biography. “When it snowed, girls fought over his footprints, which some took home and stored in refrigerators.”
Joe Biden’s Bridge to Himself
He ran for president as a short-term fix but has become a long-term proposition
by Mark Leibovich in The Atlantic
Read it because: Biden never told us he would only run for one term but… come on - it was implied, right?
The moment of Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump was a moment of huge catharsis for many Americans, who saw it as roughly equivalent to Luke Skywalker and the Rebels blowing up the Death Star. However, just like Darth Vader, Trump is eyeing the sequel. This is a fascinating window into how the next election is shaping up, and how Biden is casting himself as the hero should the empire of Trump seek to strike back.
The Killers’ Brandon Flowers: “I’m in a crisis”
The lead singer says he’s had enough of making the kind of music that’s filled stadiums for 20 years. He talks about that controversial concert in Georgia and reveals why the band abandoned its new album halfway through
by Jonathan Dean in The Times
Read it because: We’ve all roared a bit of Mr. Brightside when it’s called for (it’s always called for) but this peek into the mind of lead singer Brandon Flowers reveals an altogether different type of rockstar: a small-town Mormon that is struggling with an identity crisis.
Connect or Die
The high cost of going it alone
by Scott Stossel in The American Scholar
Read it because: Loneliness is a chronic problem in the modern world, one brought into sharp focus by the pandemic. U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared it a major public health crisis and as many as half of us feel lonely at some stage, so why do we have such a poor understanding of loneliness? Why are we so unaware of how corrosive it can be?
…for some people, loneliness, whether due to temperament or life circumstances, seems to be an inescapable existential condition. They feel an unbridgeable apartness from other people, even when in crowds… people don’t like to talk about this: loneliness, some clinical psychologists contend, is more stigmatized than depression because people fear that it bespeaks an emotional neediness that feels shameful to admit.
Reach out to an old friend today.
(Perhaps by sending a reading rec)
That’s all for this week folks - let me know if you enjoyed the recs (you can tap the ‘like’ button, reply to this mail or comment below) and if you know someone who would enjoy - just forward this mail.
Loved the article. Wrote down some thoughts while I was on plane earlier today..
- If I track a goal, the stress of getting it done coupled with the guilt of not living up to my own expectations outweighs any potential benefit of keeping me on track. For me, tracking strips the joy out of the activity itself and sets you up for failure on both ends. Either I should have done more or I could have done more. These days I set my goals like the captain of a cruise ship. Point the ship in the direction I want to go and the rest will figure itself out. Today, I’m the antithesis of the SMART goal framework and I still get a lot done! (much to the chagrin of every business professor at NEU). This works for me because if I want to do something or need to do something I will do it. I trust my unsupervised self's judgement and confident I can self police myself if needed. Maybe it’s mental gymnastics, but taking pressure off myself actually allows me to be more productive and I think it works because I’m already hard on myself.
To give a quick antidote, when I was learning Spanish I’d tell myself I need to practice one hour a day and learn x amount of vocab / grammar. This hung over my head like homework and it was hard to avoid guilt if I didn’t string together a couple of days in a row. As you can probably imagine, I wasn’t very successful with that approach, but when I switched my mindset and “goal” to “when you have free time, try to practice and also do the things that you love to do in English in Spanish” I rapidly improved. If I was super busy, the Spanish practice would slide (no big deal), but I would always find time to watch nba recap videos in Spanish because I loved basketball and I could always read an article in Spanish on the bus when I had a second. I haven’t looked back since. - Ian