If you use these emojis you’re officially old, according to study

Just the phrase 'Gen Z' is enough to terrify anyone who doesn't qualify, as it leaves us feeling very old indeed.

Gen Z, also known as the generation of digital natives, are made up of humans born between the years 1997 to 2012.

In other words, if you're reading this right now and you're between the ages of 12 - 27, you're Gen Z.

You're the cool kids on the block and you basically run the internet, and have a big say in what's cool and what's not, leaving us older Millennials fighting for our lives as we use all the wrong slang.

And if case you wanted to feel even uncooler, it turns out there are three emojis that people use that officially mark them as old - and clearly set them apart from Gen Zers.

Emojis are more complicated than you might think (Aytaç Ãnal/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

We've come a long, complicated way since just texting 'LOL'.

Hosts on RTÉ FM recently discussed a study which revealed that using the crying with laughter emoji is not cool at all.

It turns out that Gen Z are much more partial to using the skull emoji to indicate that something is funny - due to the fact it's now cool to say 'I'm dead' when something makes you laugh.

Something has been off with the laughing emoji for a while now, it turns out.

Back in 2021, Walid Mohammed, who was 21 years old at the time, told CNN Business: "I use everything but the laughing emoji. I stopped using it a while back because I saw older people using it, like my mom, my older siblings and just older people in general."

Ouch - hard criticism for an emoji that Apple named as it's most popular in 2017.

Internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch offered some more context on the crying laughing emoji, calling it a 'victim of its own success'.

She said: "If you indicate digital laughter for years and years in the same way, it starts to feel insincere. … The hyperbole gets worn out through continued use. That’s why Gen Zers may be looking to fresh and novel ways to signal they’re laughing through different ways."

To add salt to the wounds, founder of Emojipedia, Jeremy Burge, wrote on the website's blog: “It’s common wisdom on TikTok that the laughing crying emoji is for boomers.”

The RTÉ hosts also cited a statistic that 35 percent of Brits are confused by which emojis to use while messaging, and wished they had a wider vocabulary to communicate with their networks.

With all of these rules on what's cool and not cool, I'd argue we have more than enough already.

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