21 Things You Suddenly Start Seeing On Facebook In Your Mid 20s

By

The Facebook feed of someone in their mid-20s is an interesting place. It’s a bizarre mix of hard partying, aimless traveling, complaints about office jobs, and SO MANY PICTURES OF BABIES. Everyone’s either getting married, buying a house, or rejecting adulthood entirely. Full disclosure: I am guilty of over half of these personally, and I fully embrace it. I live my obnoxious Facebook life.

1. Statuses left, right, and center about “getting my dream job!!”

2. Grad school announcements that sort of make you think “Whoa, that person is still in school? Aren’t they like, 30?”

3. Weirdly long, defensive statuses about people “not respecting their life choices,” which nine times out of 10 means that someone made a snarky joke about their decision to get married or have a child.

4. Photos from music festivals, but the mature, respectable kind that let you know they’re more interested in the music and less interested in buying burritos dosed with acid to do in their tent (an actual thing that they sell at All Good festival).

5. Pictures of engagement rings, and by this I mean a photo album of 15 different angles of said ring and a few photos of the actual question-asking setup.

6. Really boring scientific/financial/political articles with a few-sentence excerpt or analysis of the article so that you know that a) this person is smart, and b) they definitely read the actual article.

7. One notch above the “boring smart articles,” the articles sourced from academic journals and research papers that the poster knows is 100 percent unreadable to everyone who’s going to see it.

8. Strategic taggings of people and their friends at restaurants/bars/clubs that are one notch above their typical “going-out” fare.

9. The person who randomly takes up cooking a few years out of college and then posts nothing but pictures of the food they make, and even goes so far as to hashtag them on Facebook, which should be a hanging offense.

10. Pictures of babies that are basically knifepoint demands for “likes,” but which harvest progressively fewer and fewer likes as people get tired of seeing the baby on their newsfeed at all times.

11. That one person who posts so many pictures of their baby that you sort of start to question where the line for personal responsibility is when it comes to giving your infant a social media presence against its will.

12. Photo albums of a wedding posted so quickly after the actual ceremony that you’re unsure whether or not there was a designated “Facebook wedding liveblogger” set up in the corner with a laptop connected to the camera.

13. Travel pictures that fall into the Eat, Pray, Love category and are heavy on the “discovering myself whilst riding an elephant” shots.

14. Engagement pictures taken in a field, ideally with train tracks off in the distance, presumably to show the long and rich journey of their upcoming marriage.

15. People who have suddenly become hardcore sports fans.

16. Friend requests from people you went to middle school with over a decade ago, and who post those weird memes from pages like “I Fucking LOVE Science.”

17. People who post rants about their job four days into working there, largely to remind you that they have a job.

18. Combative statuses that take an odd amount of pride in the fact that the person is neither married, nor engaged, nor expecting a child, because they are just getting “more awesome.”

19. Articles that casually let your whole feed know your socioeconomic bracket, such as travel articles about the “essential things to bring to Switzerland” or reviews of a Michelin-starred restaurant that you are “looking forward to trying.”

20. Pictures of drinking that come with increasingly aggressive justifications in the captions. “I EARNED this pitcher of margaritas. #WorkHardPlayHard”

21. Inexplicable professional photo as profile picture, which raises the questions “Who is just taking headshots of you? What are these for? Was this professional, airbrushed picture of you specifically taken and paid for to garner Facebook likes?” (which honestly is a hustle I respect and embrace myself). Long live the pointless professional Facebook picture.