When the group chat lit af

I’ve heard that advice a million times: don’t compare your behind-the-scenes to everyone’s carefully curated Instagram feed

But nevertheless I remain a twat who does just that. I see tweets and memes and videos about group chats all the time; sometimes they’re about the group chat being dead, and often they’re about the group chat being wild. Sadly, however, at this stage in my life, I relate mainly to the ones about the deceased nature of the group chat and can only reminisce about the times the group chat was on fire.

So, being the shameless loner I am, I shared the post below on Facebook explaining my predicament; that I have no hype crew and I am ready for things to change. I provided a completely arbitrary application process for a new squad, and lay back, half hoping the right group of people took it seriously, half expecting the newsfeed-scrollers to shrug it off as a joke.

Although I am not sure myself whether I meant it seriously, given that I find it difficult to maintain interactions online and that my life is quite the opposite of an echo-chamber, there is a good chance that this is a horrible idea and this group chat could descend rapidly into a chaotic mess. What if my friends from various opposing political spectrums get into a fight? What if people in the group chat hate each other? What if the group chat starts live but, like Windows Live Messenger once did too, it dies and leaves me twiddling my thumbs staring at memes about the group chat blowing up again?

It’s not just about the group chat though, the squad in itself is very important. In many ways, this has been quite a bittersweet moment, because in one remotely amusing Facebook post, I was forced to acknowledge the truth about where I have found myself in life — totally incapable of maintaining a squad; never truly fitting into any one group; and accepting the circumstances and mistakes I’ve made which have led me to feel unwelcome in friendship groups I honestly thought would never die.

If people do apply to join, this will make for some interesting discoveries about the nature of curating a squad. And so I have decided to log the journey we take towards finding out whether this has been a trash idea or whether Taylor Swift’s squad will have nothing on us.