It’s always fun to do an ‘end-of-year review just to see where we’ve been and where we’re headed next.

However, this year, the year-end review is strangely problematic. For me, there are only two elements that seem to stick out and actually matter.

The first is the movie “Barbie” which has earned $1.4 billion thus far. For a movie about a blonde doll to capture that much revenue and worldwide attention gives one reason to pause and ask “What’s wrong with this picture?”

The second standout event of the year is Taylor Swift. This cute singer is so powerful that the mere fact that she is dating an NFL player enhances the television ratings for the football game.

Now, of course, there are many other far more important events and ongoing trends that need to be discussed.

The ongoing wars in Ukraine and Israel for instance. Or the fact that Trump has been indicted numerous times and continues to be a front-runner in next year’s presidential election.

Income disparity continues to be an underlying cultural disease that has produced anger, anxiety and unrest and shows no signs of going away.

The way people work from home has produced ongoing concerns about productivity, social isolation and depression. Global warming continues to rear its ugly head. And let us not forget the mother of all social problems, the rise of disruptive digital technologies.

Let us take a moment to describe and discuss disruptive digital technology. This may the primary reason people fear AI’s threat to humanity.

The amount of meaningless, vacuous and distracting input we are exposed to on a daily basis is mindboggling and mind-deadening.

As just one example, I must receive over 300 emails per day from a variety of commercial or sinister sources. These must be sifted through to find the few emails that actually matter.

I would say that 98% of the emails are the detritus of the post-modern world. But emails are by no means the only form of disruptive digital technology.

One can no longer connect by phone with any company offering you a service or a product.

To make a call to a company you are guaranteed to be thrown down a rabbit hole of prompts, false tunnels and endless delays which will consume precious time and cause anger that must be repressed.

And if I have to hear “Listen carefully for our menu has recently changed” I just may explode.

The disruptive impact of the digital world does not end there. To sign into a doctor’s appointment now requires a 10-minute digital form one must fill out. To mail a letter now requires an endless series of buttons one must push to pay for your postage as the line of people behind you grit their teeth.

And recently I had to read and fill out a 120-page legal healthcare provider form to renew a contract I had with a health insurance company.

I could go on but you get my point.   Years ago this all started as a trickle but it’s become a tsunami of nonsensical typing in of passwords, user names and digital data.

And this is why we can no longer think about what happened yesterday, last week or last season.

We are all overstuffed with meaningless input and data and so we no longer have the capacity to recall what happened this year nor to care about it very much.  And the result of all this overstuffing is that the two big stories of 2023 are Barbie and Taylor Swift.

These are strange virtual times we now live in.  We seem to be able to get a grip on Taylor Swift and Barbie but the rest just seems to keep slip-sliding away.

Okay if you like you might argue that the film “Oppenheimer”  ought to be included in any year-end review. And that would be a fair argument because in this polarized world of ours what could be more polar opposite than Barbie and the hydrogen bomb?

One says ‘come to me baby, I’m yours’ and the other says  ‘you better run like  hell, you’re about the be burnt up.’  We can now attend only to the extremes in life.  Anything less than extreme does not compute.