And Probably Will Be For Life Trend.

This essay contains a couple of thoughts on the “In Your 20s, There Will Be” trend. Or the “And probably will be for life… time casts a spell on you” trend. I’m not entirely sure what it’s called, but if you’ve been on social media lately, you’ve definitely seen it.

My Instagram feed has been hijacked by a very specific kind of content lately and I’m guessing yours has too. Reels where someone overlays text on a photo or video montage.

“In your 20s, you’ll meet someone at 2 AM in a diner who asks if the seat next to you is taken. It’s very important that you say yes.”

“When you’re 23, your roommate will drag you to a concert you don’t want to attend. It’s very important that you go.”

“In your early twenties, you’ll get offered a job in a city where you don’t know anyone. It’s very important that you take it.”

~*~*~*~cue the Billy Joel-Fleetwood Mac mashup~*~*~*~

I should be sick of this. I really, really should. The internet has a way of running things into the ground, and sentimental trends are usually the first to get wrecked. THIS particular trend is sentimentality on steroids set to the most emotionally manipulative song mashup ever created. Come on Billy Joel AND Fleetwood Mac? They knew what they were doing.

But I’m not sick of it. I keep watching. I keep feeling moved by strangers telling me about the seemingly small decisions that rerouted their entire lives. Why?

Constellation logic

Let me talk about myself for a brief second (eww). A friend mentioned recently that there’s a recurring theme in my writing: pattern recognition. They appreciated the effort that goes into it, and honestly, it was the first time I’d considered this was a thing I did (let alone enjoyed). But I really do like connecting dots. Most of my essays jump between my childhood, some internet trend, a random philosophy thing, and something that happened last week.

I think we all do this. Humans are storytelling machines. We might experience life as a set of disconnected events, but we make sense of it as a narrative. Our brains organize chaos into something that resembles a plot. It’s how we make sense of being alive. I’ve written about this over and over and over and over in like five different essays.

Social media in general has made us exceptionally good at this, since it’s been around for some 20 years now. We’ve gone from dumping 78 unedited party photos online to selecting ONE blurry picture that makes it seem like we’ve got a mysterious and edgy social life, and it goes up on our stories for 24 hours. I’ve noticed especially that for people who post less often, there’s usually a lot more curation involved in choosing which moments are finally important enough to make it to the feed. Lore and myth-making is hard work, y’all.

So in keeping with the pattern recognition thing, let me give you the most embarrassingly obvious metaphor I could possibly make: constellations. Stars in a constellation aren’t related to each other. They’re thousands of light-years apart, existing in different time periods. Some are already dead, we’re just seeing light they emitted millennia ago.

But we still look up and connect them. We draw lines between points of light that have nothing to do with each other and say: that’s a hunter, that’s a bear, that’s a frying pan, that’s your mom. We take randomness and make it mean something. This trend is doing the exact same thing.

Someone stands at their current moment and looks backward to identify the pivot point, usually in their 20s, and then they take the moment that maybe didn’t feel significant back then but now reveals itself as the hinge everything turned on, and turn it into a constellation.

So why are we all watching?

I’ve been trying to figure out why this trend doesn’t annoy me the way most viral sentiment does. I think it’s because these videos aren’t really about the decisions themselves. Nobody’s watching for life advice. I’m not in my 20s anymore, so it’s too late either way.

What gets me is that these are deeply personal moments that have nothing to do with any of us. We weren’t there when they said yes, or when they took the chance. These are their stars and their constellations. And they stand in front of their phone camera and offer up their personal mythology to complete strangers: Here’s the shape I found in my life. Here’s the pattern I drew, set to Silver Springs!!!!!

And we respond by caring. It’s like we feel grateful on their behalf or something. It’s collective witnessing of private pattern-making.

The ancient Greeks looked at the same sky we do and saw heroes and monsters. We look at our twenties and see the same things in the moments and decisions and people that shaped us. It’s all made up, obviously. The stars don’t care what shapes we draw between them. But we draw them anyway, and then in the most human move possible, we show each other what we found.

It’s sweet.