Old People Using Wrong Emojis Is the Family Group Chat Crisis Nobody Warned Us About

The laugh-crying emoji is the central villain of this entire genre and it is, in a way, not even its fault. To anybody who came up online, that emoji clearly conveys “I am crying from laughing so hard.” To a generation that learned emojis the way you’d learn a new language at 65, it just looks like a face with tears, and tears are sad, and therefore this emoji is sad. The funny grandparent texts in this gallery are basically a translation error happening in real time, and there is no Rosetta Stone available.

The pet bereavement category in particular is where this lands the hardest. Somebody’s family pet has died, the post is genuinely meant to be a tribute, and the background of the post is a riot of love-struck emojis because that’s the template they picked from the menu without checking what was on it. The hilarious texting fails are not malicious. They’re the opposite of malicious. The intention is sweet and the execution is, accidentally, a meme.

The “I know” smirk emoji response to news of a death is its own special category. The intent there was almost certainly “yes, I have heard, this is so sad,” but the smirk reads as smug, and the cousins are now wondering whether mom actually celebrated when her sister-in-law’s cat passed. These embarrassing tech moments and senior emoji confusion situations keep producing accidental villain energy out of people who, in real life, would never harm a fly.

And the disguised “nice old man” emoji from Dad. The dad meant well. The dad picked an emoji that, to him, conveyed warmth and trustworthiness. The emoji in question looks like a Bond villain who has just turned to face the camera. The internet age fails are at their richest when the gap between intent and reception is this wide.

What this whole gallery quietly documents is the digital generation gap, which is real and which is also a much more affectionate phenomenon than we usually frame it as. Nobody in this collection is being a bad person. Everybody is doing their best with tools that didn’t exist for most of their lives. The emojis were not designed by them, the conventions were not built by them, and they are walking into a coded social language that the rest of us absorbed by osmosis between the ages of 12 and 25.

The thing is, the kids are still going to be the ones laughing. That’s how it works. Every generation is going to have some technology gap that the next one finds hilarious, and ours just happens to be that our parents and grandparents are publishing genuine emotional content with backgrounds that look like a birthday party and reactions that look like contempt. The screenshots will get taken. The screenshots will get posted. The aunts will not know.

What softens the whole thing, when you sit back from it, is how much love is actually in these posts. Somebody made the effort to share a memory. Somebody made the effort to acknowledge a death. Somebody picked an emoji because they wanted to add something, even if the something they added was, technically, a middle finger. The intent was always tenderness. The internet just keeps catching the spelling mistakes.