Nearly everyone today has a Snapchat. If you don’t, you’re probably weird, but if you don’t, you have still probably heard of the phenomenon known as the Snapchat streak, and more specifically, the means as to which some desperate people are maintaining their ungodly amounts of streaks.

It all starts out one day, possibly as an ironic joke. You receive a Snapchat from a friend and you eagerly open it, but only to find out that all it contains is a poorly drawn ‘s’. You scream, you cry, you wonder why you let someone so abominable access to send you Snapchats in the first place. Your creative side formulates possible things that ‘S’ could stand for, and it sure ain’t streak. But, as time progresses, the trend doesn’t cease. You become accustomed to it, and it doesn’t bother you for a while. That one friend sends you the same monotonous Snapchat every dawn and every dusk. “gm s” “gn s”. All of this until it hits you like a rock that the meaning of Snapchat has been lost. The whole point, which was originally to send stupid and humorous Snapchats to your friends has been replaced by a nearly primitive and infantile need to maintain a Snapchat streak.

A simple number on a telephone screen now dictates their entire line of communication with you. And then you sit there, wondering how you let it get so far, and subsequently send your friend a quite unapologetic rant on how all that your friendship has been reduced to is a number  on a screen. It’s a very first world problem, but with a very first world solution called the block button. Don’t get me wrong, I maintain Snapchat streaks too, but at least I attempt to give my Snapchats a sense of humanity, and not this cold, robotic, and repetitive nature that all belong to the now infamous ‘s’.

Please, Snapchat like you mean it.