Autobiography of a facebook review year 2014

A version of this post originally appeared on meyerweb.com.

I didn’t go looking for grief on Christmas Eve, but it found me anyway, and I have designers and programmers to thank for it.

In this case, the designers and programmers are somewhere at Facebook.

I know they’re probably very proud of the work that went into the “Year in Review” app they designed and developed, and deservedly so—a lot of people have used it to share their highlights of 2014.

Autobiography of a facebook review year 2014 calendar

I kept seeing them pop up in my feed, created by various friends, almost all of them with the default caption, “It’s been a great year! Thanks for being a part of it.” Which was, by itself, a little bit unsettling, but I didn’t begrudge my friends who’d had a good year. It was just a weird bit of copy to see, over and over, when I felt so differently.

Still, it was easy enough to avoid making my own Year in Review, and so I did.

After all, I knew what kind of ye