After years of complaining — not just on social media but all the way back to the message boards — I no longer have a reason to complain about the 20-something crowd. I didn’t think it was possible, but something even worse has crept in that, for some weird reason, I didn’t even see coming. Ladies and gentlemen, I will now focus my negative attention on teenagers.
I couldn’t stand myself as a teenager and I’m sure I’m not the only one. If you don’t feel the same way, you’re not old enough to know better. Hell, my own kids were bad enough as teenagers and I barely liked them. Though I have worked with a few teenagers over the years, I really haven’t had to deal with many in my 35 years in the industry. I’m as old as their father or mother, so I would imagine they just assume I’m equally as stupid as their parents. I mean, have you ever known a teenager who wasn’t smarter than their parents?
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Teens don’t want to follow a guy on social media who is the same age as their father because, as I stated earlier, what the hell could I know? Teenagers obviously have already come up with things we never thought of over the course of 20 or 30 years. There’s nothing they are going to learn from any of us; they would much rather get their cutting-edge information from people who have lived it all and done it all… at 18 years old. In turn, I don’t follow teenagers, either, because I can’t stand them. We both have seemed to coexist without running into each other, until...
I had some downtime the other night and was farting around (old-man phrase) on Instagram when I came across a response from a 14-year-old to someone I follow. For some stupid reason, I clicked on the kid’s profile. I guess I was curious, but I would give anything to be able to go back and do this all over again.
This kid had been training for three weeks and his IG account was the same age. He had the word “official” after his IG name. I wasn’t sure exactly what “official” meant, but I quickly learned from all of the other dipshit teenage accounts that I clicked on, that this must be something teenagers do when they can’t get their account verified by IG. Sound stupid? They’re teenagers; of course it’s stupid.
Based on his posts for three weeks, he had gone from declaring that he had just started working out, to posting that he was going to be in the Olympia one day, to posting that he had decided he was just wanting to get huge and be like so-and-so *insert name of “huge and ripped” 17-year-old*. I will get to this 17-year-old in a minute. I’m still not done with the 14-year-old.
I went through his posts and this kid is, of course, giving training advice. He is telling all of his followers how he has gotten big in the last three weeks (he weighed 130 pounds) and is telling them what to eat and giving them inspirational quotes. This kid had 17k followers and you might think, “You can BUY followers, Skip!” No shit; I am aware of that. However, he typically had 40 to 50 responses on his posts, with dialogue going back and forth with his followers. I was like WTF? I only have 5k followers, and though I haven’t purchased even one follower, he HAS MORE POST ENGAGEMENT THAN I DO. For a second or two, I contemplated DMing him and asking him for advice about how to get more engagement but quickly came to my senses.
I know what you’re thinking, “It’s no big deal; he’s a kid.”
Hold on. It gets better.
My curiosity is not my friend at this point, so I click on the profile for the 17-year-old “jacked” kid. He has 93k followers and hangs out with another teen friend who is barely 18 and is a physique pro. When did teenagers get pro cards? Why am I over here not knowing this can even HAPPEN? The 17-year-old is posting about meeting his fans at some expo and he might be 5-foot-5 and 140 pounds. He APPEARS to be on plenty of gear but doesn’t have a physique that could stand on stage and do well at teenage nationals.
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I find myself creeping on this kid’s posts like some kind of psycho stalker. I am scrutinizing every word he says, how he interacts with his “fans,” and I’m rolling my eyes so often that I get a headache. He is handing out the most rudimentary advice that anyone could find with a quick Google search, but the inspiration he was bestowing on his fans — just as douchey as an adult, but somehow like nails on a chalkboard because it was coming from someone who doesn’t even know how to use his dick yet.
The pictures were equally as bad because there is just something off-putting about a kid pretending to be an adult. He had pictures from “photo shoots” sitting on top of a firetruck, behind a police car, on railroad tracks, on a Supersport motorcycle, etc. These weren’t iPhone pics; the pictures were professional. I actually said out loud, “Where in the world did these kids learn this shit?” Then it hit me.
I actually laughed out loud. You know, lol, but I didn’t want to type “lol.”
They learned every single thing from US — the douchey adults on IG. You can say you don’t do it, but almost every single one of us does it.
Should we all be giving advice about training? Some of us don’t have much of a physique that should be handing out any form of training advice, at all, but we do.
Should all of us be posting inspirational quotes? An awful lot of us talk about doing things and having character traits that our closest friends know damn well we don’t have, but followers believe that shit, so it’s gonna get posted.
Should a guy who isn’t ripped be telling his 500 followers how to get ripped? Too many of us are fatties and have no business doing it, but we do.
I watched a loud-mouthed adult just tonight at Fresh Market — loud enough so that everyone within 60 feet could hear him — give a play-by-play for a Facebook story while the lady scooped his kale salad and weighed it. Why anyone would give a shit what an average grown man eats for dinner on a Sunday night is beyond me, but we do it.
All of this being said, I really can’t blame these kids for doing exactly what they have seen countless adults do and at least they are keeping to themselves. Fourteen-year-old Jonny Beastmode doesn’t give a shit what I think he should do; he wants to know what 17-year-old Stan Injects-a-Lot takes for a pre-workout to get so huge. He isn’t following me and I am not following him. This is precisely why I didn’t know about this group of douchey teenagers until tonight.
I realized that as much as I cannot stand 20-something know-it-alls, teenagers are worse. I know that no matter what I do, they aren’t going to like me, and I am not going to like them. I didn’t know what else to do, so I DM’d all three of them and told them EXACTLY what was on my mind; I asked them to send me nudes of their moms. Hey, Just Sayin.
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