😀 vs 😁

This is a small change that has happened in my text. By default, I’ve been used to using the smiley for ages. My default smiley for everything used to be 😀

The reason I don’t have a lot of smileys in my chat and only have the smiley, sad, or smile/sad one is that my chatting days go way back to IRC (Internet Relay Chat). This is a text-based chat system with no support for images (and hence no smileys). So, we are stuck with 🙂 and 🙁

All it had was text support, so that means I just used a few small smileys out there and not a lot. Then I think we moved to something called Pidgin, which had a decent UI, and from there, there were many others.

Recently, I’ve been getting a lot of feedback about my smiley. According to the latest Gen Z, it’s sarcastic, apparently. It’s not a smiley smile. It’s not a happy smile, it seems. There was a small discussion with the intern about the smiley. Interns are the set of folks from whom I learn a lot.

Here is a conversation between two interns, deeply discussing about the smiley I use.

Of course, the interns were brave enough to tell me (and multiple times).

And was shared this link to re-learn how to use emojis.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/justyna-sidor-176325b_i-thought-i-was-cool-until-my-gen-z-coworker-activity-7346815755704774657-EJw1?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios&rcm=ACoAAC7-2P4BCvK8eonMei1ULvUQgJBfGVj3VGg

I decided to change it, but changing what you’re used to seeing with the smiley isn’t possible because of muscle memory. I had to go into one of the Mac settings, which changes the smiley from this to this when you type this. That way, I think I can still rely on my muscle memory to type the smiley and let technology take care of the string replacement for me.

Of course, the feedback for the change is also not so great. People felt it was weird. It’s not me, but that’s the whole point. You do have to change according to the times. Even though it’s probably uncomfortable, if you keep sticking to your old methods of doing things and not changing with time, you’ll end up becoming a dinosaur. That’s one of the things I learned from the interns.

So, this change is to ensure no matter how uncomfortable changes are, when it comes a place of good intent, we go ahead and adapt anyway. Don’t want to become a dinosaur in the current world!