If you’re anything like me, you find joy and nostalgic comfort in year-end lists. We consume listicles online, read recaps that make February 2025 already sound dated and look forward to seeing streaming platform Spotify fully utilise its AI capabilities to categorise our daily listening habits. The curated data points have become somewhat of a content farm, neatly wrapped up in a shareable bow and a pretty template.

Every year, Spotify Wrapped takes over our social media feeds, friends and family share stories, and snapshots of everything quantified from their Listening Age to Most played Artist. This year, the streaming platform went a step further and dove right into our subconscious, generating time-stamped listening reports with catchy texts such as: "The day you swapped pop for podcasts and never looked back."

For some reason, my listening age is 80 this year, even though I rarely listen to oldies. I’m not quite sure what the blip was, but the data doesn’t lie. From what I remember, I had a rotation of Olivia Dean and Ba Ba Black Sheep, the latter a frequent request from my 21-month-old.

The app shows how many hours you’ve spent glued to artists, how many minutes you’ve hummed to an album and just about everything you need to know about your listening habits. This is what big tech does to your hobbies now. It consolidates, quantifies and repackages your quirks into a handful of well-designed slides.

Sometimes, I miss the simpler times when not everything can be consolidated and broken down to a single data point, the magic of putting effort into manually curating your own playlist on an iPod, but those devices are long gone now and probably in a museum somewhere.

That said, it’s not surprising that my Spotify age is 80, given the sudden onset of nostalgia for simpler times.

The way we consume year-end lists speaks to our psychology. The best books of 2025; The best Netflix shows this year; 2025’s biggest headlines. This week, we also published a series of BitesizeBKK Wrapped, Bangkok Edition. Because the calendar imposes a numerical order on the concept of time, it’s only fitting that when we reach the last page, it’s natural to revel in the celebration of time passed.

For content creators and those in media, the annual year-end listicle is both an efficient and tiresome way to churn out content, but one we must partake in every year. It’s a ritual, just like those weekend happening roundups.

All this narrative about the mechanics of Wrapped has got us thinking about the year-end recap and Bangkokian trends this past year. If Spotify Wrapped is a digital diary that tells us what we listened to throughout the year, every embarrassing playlist, nostalgic album or sharp podcast commentary, then our very own Bangkok Life Wrapped 2025 would shed light on how we lived this year.

Spotify Wrapped works because it turns our private micro-behaviours into shareable narratives. If we were to apply the same lens to Bangkok 2025, what would it reveal about our capital city of apparent contradictions?

For one, 2025’s top headlines paint a worrying picture. Natural disasters dominated our narrative, from the earthquake earlier this year to the devastating floods in the South just weeks ago. Then, we saw a series of headlines about financial fraud schemes, ranging from celebrity figures to Cambodian scam syndicates, many of which are also closely linked to Thailand. There’s news of economic contraction, tariff fallout and the re-escalation of our country’s conflict with Cambodian troops.

If this were turned into a playlist, it wouldn’t quite be the life of the party.

If I could make any sort of resolution for 2026, I’d hope for some good news. I think our country needs more of that, and voters need to regain confidence in the system. With another round of elections coming up, it’s difficult to remember why we get up to vote in the first place.

Bangkok saw multiple shifts and bursts of colourful creativity within emerging trends this year. A cultural Wrapped would show the city’s emerging green spaces, a healthier Bangkok driven by padel matches, running clubs and parks, and the rise of WHOOP band culture. It would highlight a series of luxury 5-star hotel openings across prime addresses, a shift in tourism demographics and the birth of new mixed-use developments.

It would highlight how matcha and our city’s longstanding love for independent coffee shops remain strong. Creators on TikTok mainly drive trends and media platforms are speaking up, acting as truth advocates more than ever.

Behind exasperated sighs over Thailand’s deep-rooted structural flaws and rampant corruption, there’s still a sizeable population of passionate, creative and driven like-minded people who are collectively keeping Bangkok’s heart beating. This is the playlist I’d replay every year. I hope we all sing and dance our hearts out.

Niki Chatikavanij is the founder of BitesizeBKK, a digital news outlet.