You could hardly open an app or website during December without it eagerly foisting upon you a ‘year in review’. First, Spotify Wrapped and Apple Music Replay teamed up to suggest I’d turned into my dad by not listening to enough new music. Then Duolingo tried to convince me I’m a polyglot, because it cares more about buttering people up than teaching them how to speak another language.
Next, social network Mastodon asked to build my ‘Wrapstodon 2025’, proclaiming me an Oracle. (Which I took to mean “mouthy person who talks a lot but doesn’t post enough replies”, only it phrased that infinitely more politely.) Then LinkedIn tried to drag me back to the site by sending me a QR code. Ensnared, I barely managed to stop myself writing a thought leadership post on why a personalised snapshot of your 2025 is not just content but a mindset infrastructure shift for digital soul identity KPI optimisation.
Even my banking app tried the ‘year in review’ thing. Although I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to rewatch it. Perhaps the app had become sentient through the sheer embarrassment at what it had been forced to do, and buried the ‘year in review’ so deep it was even harder to find than, say, your annual interest statement or any method whatsoever to conveniently pay someone. (Banking apps: not my favourite thing.)
Anyway, I’m not a fan of the trend – although, full disclosure, I did enjoy Fitness Wrapped informing me I’d walked 1.6 million steps last year. Fortunately, not all of them at once. But all this got me thinking: while all these apps and services on my iPhone are chucking this stuff my way, it’s just as well the iPhone itself isn’t. Because Screen Time Wrapped would be terrifying.
Scream time
You can imagine the scene. The holidays loom into view. Your iPhone display suddenly goes a very serious shade of black. A bell tolls. “Oh dear”, it says on the screen, in stark, white text. You try to swipe. Nothing happens. A little progress bar appears and crawls ever so slowly along. “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear”, your iPhone adds.
With you now mildly panicking, your iPhone doesn’t so much suggest you sit down as demand that you do so. “Although, judging by your stats this year, you did rather too much sitting over the past 12 months”, it continues, unhelpfully. It then launches into the year in review proper. And that’s when the real horror begins.
“The apps that define your year” appears. You swear your iPhone audibly sighs before churning out a list of social media apps you should know better than to waste your time on. Dramatically, it then outlines precisely how many hours you spent using them, and how few non-doomscrolling years you have left to live if you don’t change your ways.
Chastised, you sit numbly as the lecture continues with a flurry of new rebukes. “The stupid games you can’t stop playing.” “Several days on Apple Music is fine, but did you really need to play Star Roving quite so many times?” “16 apps installed with the intent to do genuinely meaningful stuff, but never used.” “247 nights where you should have gone to sleep but didn’t, because you were faffing about watching ‘just one more’ YouTube video. What is wrong with you? Don’t you have even the slightest amount of self-control?”
Finally, it ends: “Procrastination Prodigy: you are in the top 3% of global time-fritterers.” You resolve to do better next year. But you know you won’t.
- Now read: The Stuff guide to mindful tech use
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