Once upon a time, social media was like a digital fridge door—messy, mismatched, filled with birthday wishes and holiday photos where someone’s thumb was always in the frame. Now, it’s a reality show where everyone is the main character and the audience is refreshingly indifferent. Somewhere along the way, we stopped posting and started performing.

It’s World Social Media Day, and somewhere, someone is celebrating with a boomerang of their iced matcha and the caption: “Just vibin’ ✌️ #grindset.”

There was a time when your profile picture stayed the same for six months, and you weren’t worried about “engagement”—unless you were actually getting married. Orkut had testimonials. Facebook had Farmville. Twitter wasn’t X. And “influencers” were either your grandmother or the neighbor aunty with unsolicited opinions about your career. #IYKYK

We used to log in. Now we exist online.

For Gen Z, the feed is canon. Posts are lore. And everything’s either a soft launch, a hard launch, or a situationship announcement wrapped in an aesthetic sunset. They’re fluent in sarcasm and delulu, and use phrases like “this ain’t it,” “caught in 4K,” and “main character energy” while silently praying for their latest Reel to hit algorithmic gold.

Gen Alpha? They’re basically born with a digital presence and a Roblox avatar. Their idea of play is editing YouTube Shorts while side-eyeing you for not knowing what a “rizz check” is. You ask them to go outside, and they ask if that’s a new app.

And us Millennials? We’re hanging on like emotional USB drives, posting throwbacks with captions like “simpler times 🥺” while pretending we understand BeReal, when really we just want Orkut back.

Social media has become a hall of mirrors, except each mirror has a filter, a caption, and a discount code. You’re not aging—you’re getting better at hiding it behind Clarendon. You’re not lonely—you’re “taking a break from the noise.” You’re not lost—you’re “finding your path” with help from an influencer named Ayush_Protein_v2. (please like, share and subscribe, frands.)

Then there are the trends.
Everybody’s doing “get ready with me” (GRWM) videos to pick out outfits to stay home. People are trauma-dumping on TikTok to chill beats. One girl cried on camera and gained 90K followers overnight. No notes. Peak performance. She ate.

Instagram tells you to “create” but really means: copy that trend, slap on audio you don’t even like, and pretend to laugh while pointing at floating text. Stories vanish in 24 hours, but your self-worth doesn’t.

We’re in the era of ✨ curated authenticities ✨. Realness, but make it brand-safe. Vulnerability, but filmed from a sweet angle.

But the problem isn’t the cringe—it’s the erosion.
We’ve turned our memories into “content,” our boredom into “binge-watching,” and our solitude into “engagement metrics.” We post, react, refresh, repeat. Our personalities are now plug-ins, and every caption is SEO-optimized for attention.

Still, beneath all this, there’s hope.
A blurry photo that says “meh.” A meme that makes someone laugh on a bad day. A video of someone’s dad dancing like it is 1998. These are the unfiltered joys—silly, strange, oddly wholesome. Proof that the human soul still leaks through, Wi-Fi or not, at the last quiet bits of the Internet that haven’t been monetized yet.

The future? Probably weirder. You’ll need a premium plan to show vulnerability. “Feelings” will be available in dark mode. Cry-reacts will probably be NFTs. Instagram will launch a mental health prompt after every doomscroll session. The feed might—after all—start scrolling you.

But maybe that’s where we circle back. Maybe the next big trend is going offline. Or just… being boring, beautifully.

So go ahead. Post if you must. But also, just vibe. Go feel grass. Blink twice. And live a moment that doesn’t need to be uploaded.