Six years ago, when she was 11 years old, Katie Lewington from Buckinghamshire, England, poured some Dr Pepper into two Starbucks cups. She didn’t like coffee—she didn’t drink coffee; she and a friend had just finished two sugary frappuccinos when they had the genius idea to decant some dark soda into the iconographic cups. Lewington was after one thing and one thing only: attention. She sent the picture to her Snapchat followers, captioning it “iced coffee” followed by an excited emoji with its tongue sticking out: 😛.

Lewington recently reshared this post—and a mass of others—in a TikTok entitled “things i genuinely posted on snap at age 11.” Over 80,000 similar videos have been posted on the site, each soundtracked by a medley of songs from 2015. The trend is fun and funny, sure, but it is emblematic of something deeper. The first generation of people to grow up with social media in their pocket—the first generation to use it religiously in early adolescence—is now taking stock.

One TikTok in particular, uploaded by the user @rckelly99, is a hilarious, melancholy, and revealing insight that’s earned 227,000 views. In the video, she discusses the Snapchats she sent in order to seem like she had “this amazing life” at age 13. She would Google pictures of people drinking and act like she was at parties with them; take pictures of her grandad from behind to pretend he was a young friend; snap selfies with her dad’s gardener; make up names of pals that didn’t exist.

Alongside her Dr Pepper pic, Lewington’s TikTok featured old Snaps of her messing around in a supermarket and one petulant post: “wow mum, thanks for taking away my friends.” 

“I think being the first generation to be online since a young age means that we’re able to see what mistakes we made and sort of try and stop people younger than us from posting something they could regret in the future,” Lewington says of why Gen Z is keen to share their old posts. Lewington got her first phone at 10 and “immediately” got Instagram—when she later downloaded Snapchat, she would “post anything that I thought of. I think back then, being a lot younger, I wasn’t afraid of being judged the way that teenagers are now.”

Ultimately, the only thing any of us ever post for is attention—which makes it particularly funny to look back at what seemed attention-grabbing to digitally native preteens. Ethan Poisson, a 19-year-old from Atlanta, Georgia, gained 930,000 likes when he TikToked his middle school Snapchats earlier this year. The first post in the video features his cherubic adolescent face wide-eyed in shock; it’s time-stamped 12:18 am. A young Poisson captioned it: “when u realize there’s school tomorrow.”

“There’s so much to unpack there,” Poisson says now. “I was definitely trying to be funny with that weird face I was making, but I was also trying to show that I was cool and stayed up late. For some reason I thought 12:18 am was an ungodly hour to stay up till.” Poisson first gained access to social media in fourth grade after winning an iPad in a school raffle. Later, he used Snapchat to “try and show off what I was doing,” because “in middle school, everything is a competition.”

“It made me feel very cool,” Poisson says of using the app. “Whenever I would travel somewhere like New York City, I always had to post a picture of the window on the plane.” While millennials also grew up with social media, they didn’t have 24/7 access to it on their phones as children, and the platforms that were popular in the early 2000s (Bebo, MySpace, MSN, and AIM) have all but disappeared, taking cringey memories with them. Snapchat, on the other hand, handily feeds users their memories from years gone by.

“I think we’re looking back and being like, ‘Who allowed us to post these things?’” Poisson says. “We’re also just laughing at ourselves, because the internet has changed so much and things that were once normal to post are now considered ‘cringe.’”

Mille Glue, a 19-year-old from Liverpool, England, cringes when she looks back on her childhood conspicuous consumption. In one Snap she recently shared on TikTok, a 13-year-old Glue had laid out her Christmas presents, including a laptop, high-end makeup, and £10 and £20 notes.

“I’m definitely more self-assured now and wouldn’t need to flash my Christmas money,” Glue says; she now thinks the post was “insensitive and privileged.” Looking back over her Snaps has made Glue “nostalgic and sad for my younger self”; she admits she was “attention seeking” as a youngster online and would create posts aimed at friends who upset her.

“I was definitely very easily influenced by my peers,” Glue says. If friends would post pictures of themselves out for a meal, she would too. She found laying out her presents strange, but “went along with it” because it “was just a thing that everyone used to post.” Both she and Lewington say they wanted to seem “grown up” when using Snapchat.

There is, of course, a darker side. Another TikTok trend sees people making videos captioned, “unrestricted internet access as a kid” before referencing the disturbing things they saw online. “There was definitely stuff that I saw involuntarily on the internet that I probably shouldn’t have,” Poisson says. On YouTube, which favors deeper analysis, Gen Z creators have made videos such as “Implications of Growing Up With the Internet on Gen Z,” featuring discussions of internet addiction, online sensationalism, and imposter syndrome.

As they enter adulthood, Generation Z is able to assess the strange ways the internet made them act—from decanting Dr Pepper to boasting about bedtimes. But Glue says it’s kids today she worries about. “I think children are exposed to social media in a way-more-intense manner than I was,” she says. “I think it just ruins young teenagers’ outlooks on life, because they don’t live in the moment and are more bothered about posting their photo dump on Instagram. This must be so exhausting and bad for their self-esteem, because they’ve only ever compared their life to people on social media, which is a structured narrative.” In 10 years’ time, who knows how these children—or, for that matter, Lewington, Poisson, and Glue—will reflect?