You’re Only Cool If You Pay Attention To Your Snapchat ‘Streak’
I don’t know much about my 16-year-old sister’s boyfriend, but I know that he’s tall, rows for his school’s crew team, and has a Snapchat streak of 47 with my sister.
When he went to finance camp for a week this summer (I never said he was cool, okay?), my sister was pissed. Not because she missed him or she worried he was cheating on her with girls that could kick her ass in math (she barely got a D in Algebra), but because he wasn’t allowed to use his phone and it would absolutely ruin their Snapchat streak.
You see, a Snapchat streak is the little number next to each one of your Snapchat friends that counts how many days you’ve Snapchatted each other straight. You can check it by taking a snap (doesn’t matter what it’s of, take a picture of the damn wall), and going to send it to someone. If you have a streak with someone, the number will show up next to their name in your contact list when you go to send the pic. If not, congratulations, you have no streaks and you’re a fucking loser.
I knew what a Snapchat streak was — my own boyfriend and I had an impressive streak of 69 last summer when I was abroad. My younger sister informed me that we were “relationship goals” after discovering this fact.
My boyfriend and I currently have no Snapchat streak, which to me is no big deal because we currently see each other IRL every day. But to my little sister? We might as well be broken up, because Snapchat streaks are fucking everything to teenagers.
Don’t believe me? Take a gander at this Business Insider article by a poor unfortunate soul who let her 13 year old sister trick her into “maintaining her Snapchat streaks” for two weeks while she was at summer camp. Yes, a 13-year-old girl cared so much about a digitized number on Snapchat that she begged her sister to take over her Snapchat duties. And she’s not the only one.
It seems that the younger generation cares less about quality, and more about quantity when it comes to snaps, kind of like a fraternity dude’s sex life. My sister will constantly send photos of half her face or pics of the floor, but it doesn’t matter what the photos consist of as long as she’s maintaining her streaks, apparently.
To me this seems ridiculous, but when I think back to the countless weeknights I spent logged into AIM messenger waiting for my crush to sign on or the amount of screen-names I had (six, to be exact, one of which was BrunetteBitchXXX), it’s not that crazy. Besides school, what else does the average teen really have to worry about besides their social life and relationships? Even if their idea of a relationship is sending selfies back and forth until one of you eventually dumps each other via Snapchat text?
Looking on the bright side, at least the Snapchat trend among teens allows kids to actually leave their house rather than being plugged into a boxy desktop computer all day. And better to receive a random pic of the wall just to keep your Snapchat streak going than a meticulously posed dick pic, am I right?
