I was born in December of 2006, and the first generation iPhone was released in January of 2007, which means that I grew up right alongside the iPhone. As I learned how to walk, talk and read, this piece of tech was developing rapidly, too, with GPS and advanced cellular data. By the time I became conscious of that little screen the adults in my life were using, emojis were already an unavoidable part of our self-expression.
Emojis have been a constant in my life. I used to watch my mom react to her family members with abundant laughing emojis on WhatsApp. In the fifth grade, my best friend once dressed up as the smiling emoji for Halloween, which is something we still laugh about to this day.
Somewhere along the way, though, emojis stopped being universal images used to indicate a feeling; they also became a way to reveal someone’s age — or at least what age they identify as. And recent conversation makes it all the more clear there is something distinctly generational about the way we use them.
I was a pre-teen during the height of COVID, when my best friends and I communicated almost entirely through texts, Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat. When you aren’t seeing someone’s face or hearing their voice, conveying your tone suddenly becomes crucial. An extra period can create hesitation, “K” can feel like a personal attack, and one emoji can completely change the intention of a sentence.
Take 😂, for example. Technically, it means you’re laughing so hard that you’re tearing up. For most people in my generation, including my friends and I, it has become almost trite. I rarely use the laughing-til-you-cry emoji sincerely. If something is actually funny, I’m much more likely to send 😭. This sobbing emoji is an indisputably versatile champion in a sea of one-hit wonders.
When I do use 😂, it’s usually ironic. In line for a trendy fro-yo spot in NYC, I text my friends, “It feels like I’ve been waiting for years 😂😂😂”. To them, it’s clear that I’m not actually laughing about waiting in a line for fro-yo. But because of the newly altered social context of 😂, my friends know exactly how clownish of a situation I’m in.
This nuance is important. It shows us how swiftly culture moves. In this way, using an emoji “incorrectly” is kind of like using the word “rizz” today ― pretty far past prime and promised to make you look like that Steve Buscemi meme.
After recently polling a few of my friends on their four most-used emojis, 😭 was at the top of all of their lists — and this is universal, according to Google data shared with The New York Times. To the uninitiated eye, it’d be used to express crying and sadness, the emoji has transformed to mean a multitude of things.
It can express the authentic amusement that the “laugh-til-you-cry” emoji meant in another life, or audacity (“I can’t believe you just said that”), or simply stand as placeholder when you’re not totally sure what to say but still want to engage.
Sometimes I send it without even thinking about what it technically means. In TikTok DMs especially, it has become less of an emoji and more of a punctuation mark.
The beloved skull emoji works similarly. No one is actually talking about death (Mom, this needs to be reiterated to you, specifically). When my friends send me💀, they’ve died laughing. RIP. It’s a good way to go. In my expert Gen Z opinion, however, 😭 is taking over as a reaction for anything funny, to any degree.
There are also those emojis that make me pause and require some context clues. Take 👍, for example. To a more mature adult, it is a simple way to acknowledge a message. To me, it can feel passive-aggressive or like the conversation is being abruptly ended. Are you genuinely affirming what I just said, or are you subtly telling me you have nothing else to say?
In a recent correspondence with my mother (the perfect scapegoat for this story) on iMessage, she responded to my “Going to Trader Joe’s” with 👍. If a friend had done the same, I would have read it completely differently. Was she annoyed? Had I said something wrong? Is Traders Joe’s not it right now? The emoji itself hadn’t changed, but the meaning had.
Of course, I know these rules aren’t universal, they are mostly specific to those involved in American social media culture. My mom can use 😭, and I can use 😂. There are no official guidelines — yet that’s what I find so interesting. These meanings aren’t something we were taught, but they are implicit in a visual language worth examining.
I probably can’t look at someone’s iMessage and tell you their exact birth year. But give me a few sample texts, a couple of emojis and enough context clues, and I’d likely be able to make a pretty good guess.