Every Time You Post a Facebook Status About Your Big Night Out, Part of Me Dies Inside

I have an app called Timehop. If you haven't got it, or heard of it, it's basically an application that digs back through your social media posts, offering you a throwback to all the tweets, statuses and Instagrams you thought were funny and impressive when you were 17. I don't know why I look at it, I honestly don't. It's a bit like a time machine, if in Back to the Future's Marty was only able to go five years back into the past, and was stuck in his old bedroom listening to himself saying "banter" sincerely and waxing lyrical about Maccabees songs.

I don't like past me, I'm actually quite enjoying having reached the age where I no longer plaster walls of enthusiasm all over the internet. I still get excited about stuff - you should have seen me when the Jurassic World trailer dropped - but I've learned that just because I'm having a sick time doesn't mean the world needs to hear about it. This is why, of all the crushingly lame statuses I used to post, nothing makes my toes curl in agony quite like my early penchant for posting big night out Facebook statuses.

You know the ones. Every sunday the "lmao" onslaught floods your newsfeed. Grainy photos of somebody gripping a cheap vodka and coke, and sliding across a dance-floor, with the caption "somebody thought it was a good idea to skip dinner before we went out last night lol". Even worse, they often don't come with images. Some people - waking up with breath like a week-long emptied bottle of garlic mayo - drag their sticky yellowing fingers across their iPhone screen to literally type "feeling SO rough today."

By now, you've probably decided I'm the sort of person who complains about selfie sticks and text language. I'm really not, in fact, I'm glad people are having such a good time when they are out, they feel the need to spread their hungover joy over the internet. Only, if we are going to spend so much time worrying about whether or not phones should be used in clubs, with the obvious names like Berghain (and more recently the team behind Mister Sunday) banning them altogether, perhaps it would pay to think about the social media output that follows the morning after.

As I've already established, my hands are far from clean. As a teenager I used to fling a cursory "classic night" status out into the ether, so think of this less as an outright attack, and more as a self-help via redemption story. If I have changed, then so can you.

SOMETIMES, IT'S OKAY TO SHARE

To be clear, this isn't to say there is anything wrong with sharing the overspill of your wild nights on Facebook. Social media is there to be filled with the innocuous and inane material you accumulate throughout your life. If you go out and take a nice photo of the squad sipping cocktails on a crowded smoking deck somewhere, get tagging. If somebody, at the end of the night, tries to climb the gates of your old secondary school on the walk home, get that video on snapchat stat. What needs to stop are the blanket statements, the indiscriminate 'lol's, the 'omg's with less plot than an episode of Seinfeld. Remember, if you have to tell somebody something is "so funny", it probably isn't.

MAKE SURE YOUR STORY IS ACTUALLY INTERESTING

Is the hope that, somehow, in reading that you and Liz ended up chatting to the taxi driver for 45 minutes ("he must have thought we were absolutely crazy"), I will somehow be lifted by the transportive magic of your words into the back of a chatter-filled, rattling black cab? Because I'm not. You're not Hemingway. This isn't living vicariously. At best it's rubbing something in my face my that I didn't care about in the first place. It's like bragging to your gran about a Chase & Status gig.

STOP USING THE CRYING-LAUGHING EMOJI

It takes a certain type of comedy to actually make somebody cry from laughing, and the stakes have to be pretty high. Somebody bringing some hardcore porn up on the projector during a school assembly. An elderly man slapping your mate around the back of the head for pushing into a supermarket queue. Your Dad calling a telephone repair man a "daft cunt" without realising he hadn't hung up the phone properly. These moments are rare windows of magic – spikes completely out of the ordinary. The cry-laughing emoji, on the other hand, is used by 70 million people every single day. His small round yellow head might be crying from laughter, but mine is crying from despair.

STOP SAYING MESSY

Anyone who has ever described a night out as messy, basically means they got pissed but nothing that funny happened. Nobody fell in any cat litter, nobody had their shoes nicked, nobody chased a hedgehog down the ring-road, nobody performed "Controversy" in petrol station, nobody was even naked. In fact, nobody can really remember anything redeemable about the night at all. You want to know what's actually messy? A friend of mine once got back from a club, did a shit, was sick on his shit, turned around again and did another shit on that, then pulled up his boxers without wiping. That's messy, but I didn't post a Facebook status about that.

GOLDEN RULE: "IF I WASN'T THERE, I PROBABLY DON'T CARE"

Facebook and Twitter aren't texting, they are semi-public platforms where you share content to large numbers of people. It is time to up your game. Got a photo of you and Nicholas Lyndhurst in the smoking area of a pub? Fucking A. Get it shared. Listlessly typing "soooooo drunk last night but think I pulled some pretty sick dance moves :D"? Burn it. Select all, delete. You are trading on an economy of invisible memories and unheard recollections. Nobody cares, beyond you and the three or four people who probably left your house 45 minutes ago. You are performing an observational comedy routine about yourself. You are reviewing a film nobody will ever see. You are attaching cry-laughing emoji shaped weights to your ankles, and jumping into a bottomless ocean of ambivalence. You are shouting "lol" into the abyss, and it will never shout back. Let's up the game.

Angus tweets about his classic nights here.