What we remember, what we forget and the stories that shape a year

Memory is a curious thing. What we choose to remember and seek to forget could easily be described as a form of random compression and omission. You can also say with near certainty that how we remember 2025 will not be how we lived it, but how we made sense of it.

This is ever truer in the obsessively “wrapped” era of the 21st century, where lived experience is broken down into data points and repackaged into a story that claims it provides an accurate representation of the individual’s life. No wonder, perhaps, that so many people bristled at their supposed listening age when their Spotify Wrapped found its way onto their accounts. No wonder, too, that this data-dump storytelling style has prompted so many imitators, given the talking points it provides.

Which begs the question, how will you truly make sense of the year that just passed and the era we live in?

Perhaps the most unusual happenings or headlines will guide the way, although that might end up amounting to a few fragments that may include something as seemingly fleeting as a couple caught on camera at a Coldplay concert causing consternation in the summer or the scandalous theft of precious jewels by criminals in Paris. Neither event seems to provide a true sense of the year. Perhaps it might be by the search for ceasefires and a viable post-conflict future in this region and Europe, although the rolling nature of these wars means a single moment rarely defines them. Aside from that, a year in review can become a nightmarish vision of flood, famine, political declarations and those who left us. The natural and searchable memory vault that journalism provides, fills up with near overwhelming frequency, too. The next big headline is always only moments away.

Historical record is not always helpful in that regard either, even when dealing with the most consequential moments