The Unwritten Rules

Everyone past 21 is basically dead on social media. You cross some invisible line and suddenly you’re not getting the memos anymore, doing everything wrong without realizing it. It’s all unwritten rules that everyone else just knows.

I needed to understand the actual code, so I got it from some teenagers. Instagram food photos are finished—completely cringe now, which is wild because that’s literally what Instagram was for like five years ago. Snapchat Stories apparently need to hit this exact frequency where you’re visible enough to matter but not so much that you’re just screaming. Each platform has its own set of invisible rules, and I have no idea how anyone under 20 just absorbs this. It’s pure instinct, cultural knowledge you’re supposed to have if you didn’t graduate before these apps existed.

There was one honest moment where a girl said she’d never send nudes, which is the right answer, but everyone knows that’s not what’s actually happening. The gap between the stated rule and what people do is maybe the only truthful part of any of this.

I stopped trying to keep up a while ago. By the time you understand the rules, they’re different. You stay ahead of it or you become what people your age use as a cautionary tale. There’s no middle ground.