Give Me an Emoji, Dammit!

 You know what grinds my 60-year-old gears? The fact that in the year 2025 — with AI smarter than half of Congress, Teslas doing figure-eights in parking lots, and my coffee pot talking to my fridge — Twitter (or X, or whatever Elon’s calling it this week) still only lets you react to a post with a heart. Just one, solitary, painfully earnest little heart.

Look, not every post deserves love. Some deserve a laugh. Some raised an eyebrow. Some a facepalm so intense it should come with a chiropractor referral.

What I want—no, what we deserve—is emoji reactions. I’m talking:

• 😂 for the tweets that made me choke on my coffee

• 🤦‍♂️ for the ones that make me question the human gene pool

• 💀 for the truly unhinged posts that are so off-the-rails, I have to respect the chaos

• And maybe 🤬 for when someone decides to be loud and wrong in the same sentence

Facebook’s had this since the dinosaurs roamed the News Feed. LinkedIn — a place where people lie about hustle culture for likes — has more expressive options than X. What gives?

Is it that they think the single red heart will keep the rage machine humming? Keep us from defusing tension with a simple “haha”? Because believe me, I’d much rather emoji-laugh at some blowhard’s meltdown than pretend I "love" it. The heart, in this case, is a lie.

I say it’s time we storm the algorithm. Demand a real range of reactions. Bring some humanity back into the hellsite. Or at the very least, let me acknowledge that someone’s meme made me do the old man snort-laugh without having to reply like a boomer.

Until then, I’ll keep hitting that heart ironically, grumbling like a man who remembers when emojis were called “smilies” and internet arguments ended in AOL chatrooms.

Stay bold, stay bald,

Old, Bold, and Bald 🧓💥👨‍🦲