About

The Gifted Child To Depressed Adult Pipeline, not to be confused with Beware of the Pipeline, refers to a snowclone popular on Twitter that jokes about how common it is for a character trait to lead to another character trait later in life. After several people tweeted variations on the snowclone using "gifted child" and "sad adult" as the two points, the format inspired more absurd parodies.

Origin

The earliest known post of "The gifted child to depressed adult" pipeline appeared on May 3rd, 2020. It was tweeted by user @plant_momther^[1] (shown below).

Spread

Variations on the snowclone featuring "gifted child" and "sad adult" appeared occasionally over the following several months.^[2][3] On January 28th, 2021, Bustle^[4] wrote about the phenomenon of former "gifted" kids posting about burnout on TikTok. Over the following months, the "pipeline" snowclone grew more popular, and parodies began emerging. For example, on March 12th, 2021, user @ molly_mctits^[5] posted, "Gifted kid to bimbo adult pipeline," gaining over 20 retweets and 60 likes (shown below, left). On February 27th, user @transsexualist^[6] posted, "child with no interest in marriage to lesbian who loves weddings pipeline," gaining over 650 retweets and 4,100 likes (shown below, right).

Public opinion towards the "gifted child" iterations of the snowclone saw a negative shift in July of 2021 after user @lpbradley tweeted, "the 'pleasure to have in class' to diagnosed anxiety disorder pipeline," gaining over 6,500 retweets and 48,000 likes before it was deleted (shown below, left). This led to a series of direct parodies mocking the template. For example, on July 9th, user @roryisconfused^[7] tweeted, "The 'pleasure to have in class' to 'displeasure to have on my feed' pipeline," gaining over 200 retweets and 1,700 likes (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

Unavailable

External References