“You go, ‘Damn, just it’s not my crazy person… it’s everyone’s crazy person!‘”

– Elan Gale, creator of Texts From Your Ex, Tinder Nightmares, Unspirational and more

If you’re not one of Text From Your Ex’s 1.9 million followers already, here’s what you need to know: Elan Gale’s brainchild is an Instagram account with pages and pages of awkwardness captured in screenshots. They’re submitted by email, and Gale says he has a backlog of 40,000 “just sitting around.”

ROCK AND ROLLLLLL

A photo posted by Unspirational (@textsfromyourex) on Jun 9, 2016 at 10:16pm PDT

It turns out, reading through hundreds of thousands of other people’s emotionally loaded conversations gives you some pretty profound insight into relationships, technology, and privacy (or rather… the utter lack thereof).

“You’ve never had an interesting text conversation that hasn’t been sent to ten people. That’s just what people do,” Gale says. “Even though we treat relationships more casually because of text messages and the way we communicate, you have to actually trust people more to be open and honest with them because you have your entire personal life on their phone, or their watch, or their unguarded computer. And they’re irresponsible dicks… and at any moment anyone could just have a lapse of judgement for 45 seconds and leave their phone on a table without a passcode and your entire life is visible. So why pretend that it’s not?” 

Seems like a fair trade

A photo posted by Unspirational (@textsfromyourex) on Sep 9, 2015 at 2:06pm PDT

Elan Gale’s “Texts From Your Ex” book is available in paperback. This is a repeat episode which originally aired in 2015. For more Note to Self, subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, I Heart Radio, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or anywhere else using our RSS feed.