I’m starting to realize that in internet years, I’m very old. But instead of feeling irrelevant because of my ignorance of current memes or the fact that, increasingly, all my tweets are about how much I hate air travel, I feel compelled to share my hard-earned wisdom. The further away I get from my youth, the more I want to warn the younger generation, those Gen Z’ers in their puka shell necklaces and scrunchies and Vans that what they love is actually unmitigated garbage. I never knew I’d be repeating the sentences my Gen X brother used to say to me — “When you’re older, you’ll understand that I’m right” — and yet here I am, telling my niece that no, I will not be watching Friends with her. Friends, my darling, is terrible.

This September will mark the 25th anniversary of the premiere of Friends, and like most significant pop culture anniversaries, it’s set off an outpouring of collective nostalgia. Pop-up events, public screenings, and merchandise are all materializing for die-hard fans, because everyone could use a bracelet with a catcall written on it. People are debating whether Friends or Seinfeld is better (not to spoil my own article, but it’s Seinfeld and this should be obvious).

Marine biologists who probably spent years in school and hundreds of thousands of dollars on their education are out here informing us that, actually, lobsters don’t mate for life, contrary to what Phoebe, a fictional character in a bad television show whose entire personality trait is being flighty, said at some point in the late ’90s. We have also recently learned that the monkey actor who played Ross’s pet (an actual plotline from a show about people living in New York, where half the landlords won’t even let you have a well-behaved dog) is still working — which is, I guess, good for the monkey. The content never ends, and yet, somehow, people never seem to lose their appetite for more. It was recently reported that Robert De Niro is suing a former employee for, in part, watching 55 episodes of Friends in four days.

I don’t want to be dramatic, but if I read one more headline that says “Could we BE any more excited?” about some Friends-related news, I will throw myself into the nearest active volcano.

No one, least of all me, should be judgmental about other people’s taste in television programming. Currently, my favorite show is YouTube clips of a British series called Just Tattoo of Us, where “friends” or “partners” design deeply humiliating tattoos that will be permanently applied to each other’s bodies without their prior approval over design or placement. Me and my tastes are trash and I deserve nothing other than a painful death. But as someone who lived through the first round of Friends’ cultural reign, who was conscious for at least half of it, and who participated in it in real time, I would be remiss if I didn’t remind you all of the truth: Friends, a show about white people being thin and having the pointiest nipples in the continental Americas — and a show that I, at one time, watched and enjoyed — is absolute garbage.

Friends premiered in 1994, when I was 3 years old. The finale was a decade later. My most formative years were spent watching Friends. My classmates and I acted out scenes at school. I wanted to be a Rachel, but I’d settle for a Monica, though I’d tell other people I was a Phoebe, when in reality I was a Ross. My brother, who was ahead of the curve in knowing this show was unwatchable, used to fight with me when I insisted on watching reruns I had just seen the week before. (I hope he never reads this; I will never live it down.) In 2004, when my parents banned me from watching television (after I was smart enough to prank-call a teacher but dumb enough to leave my number on his voicemail), I wrote a letter begging them to let me watch the finale. Rachel got off the plane!!! I was glad, but I was also a virgin and didn’t understand that surely Rachel could find some other dick somewhere in Paris.