I’ve chosen to live my life by many overarching rules. These include, but are not limited to: Don’t drink caffeine after 8 p.m., avoid tanning at all costs and don’t believe anyone who doesn’t make eye contact. These guidelines, while seemingly disjointed, have all arisen from some specific experience that impacted (or scarred) me enough to turn whatever lesson I learned into a cardinal rule. Yet the most important rule by far is this: “Never trust anyone who was cool in middle school.”
While it started off as a half-hearted joke stemming from my own unpleasant middle school experience, this rule inadvertently ended up being the most reliable one. This was proven not only by my own unscientific experience with it, but also by a 2014 study conducted at the University of Virginia. No, I’m serious. According to Joseph P. Allen, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, teenagers perceived as being “cool” by their peers in early adolescence often adopted increasingly extreme behaviors in order to maintain their social standings. This often resulted in criminal behavior, addiction and lowered social capacities by the time “cool” test subjects entered early adulthood.
Obviously, sitting at the cool table in seventh grade isn’t a fast track to prison. But it is nice to know that at least one of my bizarre rules has some sort of logical foundation.
This brings us to the middle school climate of today. As with many twenty-somethings, my only connection to that demographic is through my younger sister. To provide some background, my 13-year-old sister is a star lacrosse player, GoPro fanatic and skilled social media user. So, she’s cool. While I yearn for the days when she followed me around like a lost puppy and rifled through my closet when I wasn’t looking, I know that they’re long gone. I came to this realization quite recently when she told me I couldn’t be seen with her in public unless I changed my outfit.
But perhaps the most fascinating observations I’ve made about my sister and all her cohorts are directly related to their relationships with social media. To them, Facebook is for the ancient and decrepit. Instagram reigns supreme. If a photo doesn’t have a good enough like-to-minute ratio, they’ll delete it. How close you are to someone directly correlates to the amount of “heart-eyes” emojis you comment on that person’s photo. Spending time with my sister largely amounts to following her around, iPhone in hand, as she scouts out colorful walls to stand in front of.
I’m not the only one fascinated by this. Countless friends and classmates have observed this growing wave of cool middle schoolers, and the mass consensus is that their constant exposure to social media is the culprit. My 13-year-old self was blissfully unaware that Hot Topic band shirts, jelly bracelets and Bermuda shorts were uncool simply because I wasn’t exposed to evidence that proved otherwise. But as the first generation to grow up with social media, younger adolescents will never have that experience.
As the youngest of three, my sister has also had the added benefit of learning from her siblings’ (my) stumbles. While this will undoubtedly save her a lot of time in the long run, I still believe that going through some sort of awkward phase is an integral element of growing up. It teaches you a lot of things, but above all else, it teaches you not to take yourself so seriously.
As with so many facets of our daily lives, the debate surrounding social media seems unavoidable. Yet, regardless of your personal opinion about the matter, there’s no need to fret. Even with social media’s omnipresence, there will always be those who intentionally fly in the face of the ever-changing “cool.” The blunder years aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.
Marisa Papenfuss is a UF English junior. Her column appears on Tuesdays.
