Funny social media moments interlude
Comedic relief in the form of five laughable social posts
Welcome to Gen Z Translator, where I break down trending topics on Fridays. If you’re new, you can subscribe here and follow me on Threads or X. Views are my own. Happy reading!
I hope you take a brain break and touch some grass1 soon, but if not, this week I’ve opted for a roundup of humorous social media posts. These are moments I found transcended the internet – and not always in a good way.
1. Job update! Going to prison!
Okay, Anna Delvey. LinkedIn is one way to hard-launch2 your future as a prisoner. “Salame, the former co-CEO of FTX’s Bahamian subsidiary and a top lieutenant to the company’s founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison in May, which he will begin serving at FCI Cumberland, a medium-security federal prison in Maryland,” Issy Ronald wrote for CNN. You gotta hand it to him on brazen confidence.
2. Till death do us part
Famous YouTuber MrBeast wants to ensure his legacy. “Certain people in my company know where to find these videos on my old computer. Just upload these once a month so it’s like I’m still alive,” he said. “In the videos, I made jokes like ‘I’m probably in a coffin right now just chilling, don’t feel bad for me, I’m dead.” That’s one way to be prepared. Are pre-recorded videos the new version of “living will and testament?”
3. RECEIPTS
Have you ever been called out with screenshots IRL? We’ve got the iMessage screenshots, we’ve got the Instagram follower list. This woman has everything she needs to present her case, and this guy looks like he’s about to have a rough day. “That's at least 11x14,” one X user wrote about the paper screenshots. “I know the folks at FedEx were cracking up printing that.”
4. Say goodbye to your internet lore
Have you ever felt the uncontrollable passage of time pressing down on you? Aha. Me neither. Stories make it easy to document your life on social media – a quick snap and a post, and it automatically saves to your archive. Meta ended up fixing this bug, stating they’d be “unable to restore these Stories,” but there’s something to be said for how much we’ve come to rely on the permanence of social media – and the ease at which our content, and therefore our memories, could hypothetically be erased.
5. Modernity has failed us
Brands will be brands. Here, an account with the bio “Useful knowledge from the lives of the Greatest People in History. Learn the stories and insights about influential people you should have learned in school” decided to chime in on another X user’s existential musings. What a history account has to do with health advice, they know either.
Read my last social media roundup: Five times social media went too far
My weekly roundup:
✈️ What I’m Doing: I’m on vacation, so this part of the newsletter is sleeping. In the meantime, feel free to get caught up on past editions of Gen Z Translator here.
Read the full Gen Z Dictionary here.
Touch grass: Said as encouragement to get off your computer/out of your house to take a mental break from the internet
Hard-launch: officially announce something, most commonly relationships