Why Are We Still Doing This at Thirty-Three?

The mean girls never disappeared. They just learned corporate language and discovered group chats.

Mean Girls became a cultural phenomenon because it captured a social dynamic many people assumed would disappear after adolescence. For some women, it never really does.

There is something deeply unsettling about realising that mean girls don’t disappear after school. For my entire childhood and teen years, I genuinely believed they would. I thought adulthood was supposed to be the great equaliser; that once we all left behind school uniforms, university halls, and the social hierarchies of our twenties, we would naturally evolve into kinder, more self-aware versions of ourselves. Surely by thirty-three, we would all be too busy paying mortgages, navigating careers, caring for ageing parents, managing relationships, and trying to remember to drink enough water to spend our energy excluding other women.

And yet.

Recently, I’ve found myself having conversations with friends that sound eerily similar to the ones we had as teenagers. Different people. Different settings. Different stakes. But the same underlying dynamic. The whispered comments. The strategic exclusions. The group chats you’re somehow not in. The dinners everyone knows about except you. The subtle digs disguised as jokes. The strange competitiveness that appears whenever another woman seems happy, successful, attractive, or simply comfortable in her own skin.

The difference now is that nobody is standing beside a locker calling you ugly.

The modern mean girl has had years to refine her craft.

She understands optics. She knows how to maintain plausible deniability. She has learned that outright cruelty reflects badly on her, so she wraps it in politeness instead. She’ll tell you she’s “just being honest.” She’ll insist you’re “overthinking things.” She’ll post inspirational quotes about supporting women while simultaneously making sure certain women never feel supported by her. She has mastered the art of appearing kind while behaving otherwise.

What fascinates me most is not that mean girls still exist. Human beings have always been messy, insecure, tribal creatures. What surprises me is how shocked we continue to feel when we encounter them. Every single time, I find myself thinking, surely we’re too old for this now. Surely by our thirties we’ve moved beyond treating friendship like a popularity contest.

But perhaps age and maturity aren’t the same thing.

One of the great lies we’re sold as children is that getting older automatically makes people wiser. It doesn’t. Age simply gives people more experience. What they choose to do with that experience is entirely up to them. Some people become more empathetic. Some become more secure. Some learn how to celebrate other people’s successes without viewing them as threats. Others simply carry the same insecurities they had at sixteen into adulthood, dressing them up in designer handbags, wellness jargon, and professional titles.

The older I get, the more I realise that some women don’t actually want connection. They want ranking systems. They want to know where they stand. They want to know who is prettier, more successful, more desired, more accomplished, more admired. Every interaction becomes a silent scoreboard. And when life is viewed through that lens, another woman’s success can never simply be good news. It becomes evidence that they’re somehow losing.

The truly secure women in my life don’t operate this way. They’re easy to spot because they make you feel larger rather than smaller. They celebrate your wins without immediately redirecting the conversation back to themselves. They recommend you for opportunities. They introduce you to people. They speak highly of you in rooms you’re not in. Most importantly, they understand that life is not a reality television competition where only one woman gets to leave with the prize.

Perhaps that’s why I’ve become less interested in understanding mean girls and more interested in recognising genuinely kind women. One group drains your energy. The other expands your world.

Because eventually, if you’re lucky, you reach an age where you stop asking why certain women don’t like you. You stop trying to decode their behaviour. You stop wondering what you could have done differently. You realise that not every exclusion is a reflection of your worth, and not every friendship is meant to be yours.

And then something shifts.

You stop chasing invitations to tables where you’ve never truly been welcome and start building your own instead.

That, I suspect, is the real lesson of your thirties.

The mean girls are still here.

But thankfully, so are the women who make you forget they ever mattered.