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Analysis
LinkedIn was once a place to store your digital résumé and to see the résumés of all your current and former coworkers. In recent years, it has morphed into another social media platform where CEOs and business leaders write cringey posts about getting rich, managing employees, and laying people off.
The kind of post that appears on LinkedIn today is so recognizable that someone made a viral post generator that lets you create your own—and select the “cringe level.”
And while LinkedIn posts don’t have the same character restrictions as Twitter, I’ve seen a lot of tweets and tweet threads that are easily mistakable for a LinkedIn post.
Earlier this month, we saw a financial adviser tell his followers that people need friends that they talk about money with rather than pop culture and politics by age 30. This week, the Main Character was Shane Morris, a faith-based podcaster and writer.
He tweeted: “Millennials who are very cavalier about not having children are in for a shock when they enter their 40s & realize life is only half over. What do you do at that point? Keep trying to be sexy & have fun? I expect to see a lot of sadness & confusion about what to do at that point.”
He went on to say that Friendsgivings—gatherings with friends on or around the Thanksgiving holiday—”will get old, quickly.”
The tweets reignited the ongoing debate between people who think it’s fine for adults to not have kids and people who insist that those who are childfree will regret their life choices.
Morris’ initial tweet received more than 20,000 retweets and 15,000 replies. The debate came the same week that news outlets reported on the current cost of raising a childthrough age 17: $300,000. That figure doesn’t include college.
Besides the cost, a lot of people simply do not want to be parents. But no matter how many times people echo this sentiment, there’s always someone trying to convince the childless to start a family.
Why it matters
Life Advice tweets, as I’m referring to them from now on, keep getting ratioed because Twitter is the wrong platform for that kind of content.
Twitter is great for random shower thoughts or talking about a niche subject, but telling people how they’re going to feel by a certain age doesn’t land well and will almost always lead to a ratio.
Yet I expect we’ll see more of these kinds of tweets as millennials move into their 40s. One day, maybe in our 80s, people will stop talking about millennials like we are helpless teens who don’t know how to navigate life.
