Am I the Old Person on the Internet Now?

going from the digital natives to "millennial cringe"

“You’ve got mail.” Oh, how I delighted in those three simple words!

The joy of emails waiting just for me, made even sweeter by the patience required of my ten-year-old self enduring that unmistakable symphony: the dial tone, the high-pitched beeps, the static, the sudden pause, and one last garbled shriek before, finally, I was online.

My internet journey may have started with Oregon Trail and a dial-up AOL account, but as both the internet and I grew up, I had a front-row seat to its evolution - watching it come alive and completely reshape the world. And I was all in - curious, engaged and energized by its endless possibilities. I worked at start-ups during the boom, was an early adopter of social, and wasn’t just following trends - I was part of the movement creating them.

We were the digital natives, seamlessly hopping from platform to platform: the Blogspot era (because im addicted, anyone?), to Tumblr aesthetics, the Valencia filter to DSLR-heavy Instagram, the early, innocent days of YouTube vlogging, checking in on Foursquare like it mattered, and firing off quirky 140-character tweets.

And the faster the internet moved, and the deeper I immersed myself in it, the easier it became to spot the old people trying to do the internet. You know what I mean: run-on sentences in email subject lines, blurry family Facebook posts, chaotic font sizes, forwarded spam chains promising wealth from a prince, and, of course, alllll the tech questions.

But now, I can’t help but wonder… have I become the old person trying to do the internet?

The signs are there:

• iOS updates stress me out.

• I’m not on TikTok/I watch TikToks on Instagram.

• I write full sentences in texts (with punctuation) and receive texts from my Gen Z nieces like, “ok cool wbu” which feels like solving a puzzle and often ends in Googling.

• I use emojis that have been deemed uncool but have no idea they're “out.”

• I have a sourdough starter in the fridge.

• Those dance memes kids do in grocery store aisles and on Bar Mitzvah dance floors? Don’t know them.