’Tis the season to share your end-of-year highlights online.

Last week saw Twitter and Instagram flooded with colourful screenshots from Spotify Wrapped, the music streaming platform’s annual deep dive into its users’ listening data, complete with weird, wonderful and sometimes downright embarrassing stats about what’s really going on in our headphones. Full disclosure: in the year 2022, my top artist was not Taylor Swift, Beyoncé or even ABBA, as I’d have predicted, but The Beatles. There truly is nothing like being on the cutting edge of popular culture.

It’s not just our music tastes we’re sharing. If you’re chronically online, December often means a scramble to quantify the past 12 months, whether that’s through curating a list of your favourite films or books through a platform like Letterboxd or Goodreads, posting your year-end exercise stats or getting involved with the ever-popular ‘top nine’ trend on Instagram, which stitches together your most-liked photos from the past year in one handy, ready-to-post square.

The psychology behind end-of-year lists: why do we love to quantify the last 12 months?