Thrilled to announce...

On the cringe of celebrating, and the quiet art of marking a thing

The thing nobody tells you about graduating is that they don’t actually give you anything. You spend a year and a frankly criminal sum of money, and at the end of it you queue up in a gown that smells faintly of someone else’s nerves, a man you have never met almost mispronounces your name, you walk across a stage, and the climax of the whole affair, the thing a transatlantic move and roughly the GDP of a small island were building toward, is a handshake.

That’s it. A handshake. The actual degree, the real one, the piece of paper, arrives by post either weeks earlier or slightly too late to feel relevant, and goes straight into a drawer with other important things you rarely look at. I graduated on a sunny London afternoon recently, and the whole thing was over almost before it had begun, the way the best parts of your life have a habit of ending before you’ve quite realised you were in them.

And then, because there isn’t really anything else to do when something ends like that, I did the “correct” thing. Or not correct, exactly. More like the only thing anyone ever does. I met my classmates, took far too many photos, went out, and got drinks. Several, obviously. It would have felt almost disrespectful not to.

What I did not do was open LinkedIn, put my cursor in that little box, and type the four most embarrassing words in the English language: Thrilled to announce that…

Okay. I did do exactly that almost five months ago, when I actually graduated. And more recently, a carousel on Instagram, though I did at least avoid the genuinely overused pun of being “one degree hotter”, so that’s a win.

Right?

Let me be clear about where I stand: I am both the person who performs the small internal eye-roll at the “humbled and honoured” posts and the person who has written them. I have cringed at the genre, and I have, occasionally in the same afternoon, been the genre.

And here is what I have been turning over since: why do we do it? Not why we cringe at it, but why we reach for that little box in the first place. Unfortunately there isn’t one answer, which is precisely the problem. Some of it is pure admin, a degree is a line on a CV and LinkedIn is where the lines live, and posting it is no more meaningful than updating your address. Some of it is simpler than that, the unembarrassed wish to tell the people who would actually be glad to hear it. And some of it, if we drop the act entirely, is the quiet, undeniable desire to be seen doing better than we were yesterday, and, if possible, a little better than the people around us.

A few hundred people you half-know watching you do well, pausing just long enough to register it, to place you somewhere in the invisible ranking we all pretend not to keep. And I would be lying if I said I didn’t feel that too, that small, warm lift at the back of my neck that has very little to do with the degree itself and a great deal to do with being seen to have it.

And yet, knowing all of that, we still flinch when somebody else does the very same thing. Which is the part worth sitting with, because the cringe was never really about the celebration. We would, or at least should, forgive naked pride in a heartbeat. It is the performance that bothers us, pride dressed up as reluctance, ambition wearing the borrowed language of humility. The eye-roll is not squeamishness about emotion, it is a bullshit detector going off, and going off correctly.

The trouble is that we have trained that detector too well. After a few thousand identical “thrilled to announce” posts, it no longer distinguishes between the staged and the sincere. It flags everything. And somewhere in that overcorrection, something real gets caught in the blast radius.

It was not always this complicated. There was, in school, a small, unsanctioned economy of celebration, the one nobody taught us and nobody had to. The packet of chocolates you brought in on your birthday and walked desk to desk distributing. The celebration after an exam, with the entire lot decamping to the same tired place to order the same fried things and dissect a paper you had already, by unspoken agreement, decided to stop caring about. The free kick you scored once during the thirty minutes of break, a goal so improbably, unrepeatably good that your entire team mobbed you on a patch of dust as though you had won something, which of course you had, before you were herded back inside to a gruelling physics class. There was no occasion in any of it. The occasion was being alive on an ordinary Tuesday, which we correctly understood, at thirteen, to be reason enough. And we did not announce a single one of these things to anyone, because there was no one to announce them to and nowhere to announce them. So they happened for the only audience that has ever really mattered: the people in the room.

I am not, to be clear, defending or attacking the Instagram carousel or the LinkedIn “thrilled to announce”. That can go. Or stay. I don’t really know. But I have started to suspect that we threw out something real along with it. Which is the simple human instinct to mark a thing. To say: this happened, it mattered to me, and I am going to interrupt the relentless forward grind of my life to sit in a room with people I love and acknowledge it.

Because it will dissolve. That is the one thing you can be certain of. The handshake fades, the real degree arrives weeks later and goes in a drawer, and a year on you could not tell me, under oath, what the weather was like on the single afternoon that years of your life were leading up to. Unless you stopped, and grabbed a drink, and burned the date into yourself with the small fire of having actually, in your body, in a room, felt it. (And clicked a few photos, of course.)

I don’t think we have lost the will to celebrate at all. And I don’t think the post is the enemy either. A platform can measure visibility, the likes, the reach, the number of people who paused on your face for half a second. What it cannot measure is meaning, because meaning leaves no metric behind. But that was never an argument against putting the photo up. Sometimes the posting is the pause, the small act of stopping to say this one is worth keeping. The only real mistake is the other one, going to the metric to find out whether it mattered, and refreshing the post long after the afternoon it came from has gone cold.

So here is where I have landed. I went out. Partied a little too hard, and chances are I will remember that over the actual graduation. I made the slightly stupid carousel with a not entirely stupid pun. And given the chance, I would do it again, louder, because the alternative is to arrive at the end of a life that was, on paper, full of achievements, and discover that you never once stood still long enough to feel a single one of them happen.

So raise the glass. Mean it. Let somebody see you mean it.

Thanks for reading!