FROM ISSUE 32#3: WHAT’S THE USE? Why Do We Meme?
A small-scale, personal exploration of the ways we use memes, from ‘The main reason half the world has not committed die’ to ‘Me getting euthanized 😎’
Merthe Voorhoeve
Like most people of the Gen Z generation, I spent some of my formative years on the internet. Internet culture and memes have been a part of my life since I was around the age of twelve. It all started with an odd-looking frog[1] and a socially awkward penguin,[2] and somehow, I have now ended up with a somewhat extensive ‘personal’ collection of memes, consisting of ‘saved’ posts on Instagram and Twitter,[3] and probably thousands of screenshotted images. When scrolling through these memes, I often wonder, besides smiling and giggling to myself, why am I doing this? Why are we doing this? By ‘this,’ I mean, both the saving of these images as well as repeatedly revisiting them, sometimes laughing out loud like I have not seen a meme at least ten times by now, and always feeling a weirdly deep sense of affective satisfaction.
Curing Our Depression
In just the last two decades, the ‘meme’ has gone from a relatively peripheral internet phenomenon to an almost ever-present figure or mode of communication, which has now gone ‘beyond the internet, beyond discourse, and beyond the image.’[4] Far from only taking the form of humorous images of cats to be shared with friends on the web, memes have found their way into the world(s) of art, music, and advertisement. Despite, or perhaps because of this prevalence, the concept of the ‘meme’ can be difficult to describe accurately. Internet phenomena, residing in another ‘realm’ than our ‘irl,’ real life-reality, sometimes seem to escape our everyday language. For instance, describing a strangely funny meme to your parent might feel like trying to describe a dream you had. Something you experienced, but do not really understand yourself.
To find out how others have attempted to describe memes, I visit Urban Dictionary. Originally meant as an ‘alternative’ dictionary for ‘slang’ words and phrases,[5] Urban Dictionary is a website that follows the ‘democratic’ logic of most social media websites: anyone can submit descriptions to popular words and phrases and the entry receiving the most ‘thumbs up’ will feature as the ‘top definition.’ The top definition of ‘memes’ says: ‘The cure of depression,’ which surprises me. Interestingly, the top second contribution follows a similar path, taking a dark turn halfway: ‘Memes are a lifestyle and art used by teens and adults who are willing to actually live a life that doesn't include depression. Technically the main reason half the world has not committed die.’[6] Even though topics such as ‘depression’ and being ‘tired of life’ often occur in popular meme imagery, I did not expect to find such a distinct emphasis on them here. Echoing the cliché phrase that ‘laughter is the best medicine,’ are memes really helping us cope with our mental health issues?
When thinking of the notion of memes as a cure for depression, I do not think we should understand ‘depression’ in a strictly individualised medical sense. Rather, we should think of it in societal terms. Some would argue that individualised mental states are always a farce, that our mental health coincides with the state of the larger framework in which our lives take place (culture, politics, economics). In other words, what we are describing as depression might just be a ‘natural response’ to the horrors of living through late capitalism, climate emergency, and countless other crises. At the very least, our mental state and the ‘state of the world’ cross-pollinate each other, but opinions differ when it comes to the main direction of this influence. Arguing against Jordan Peterson’s notion that we need to ‘clean our room before we can better the world,’ Slavoj Žižek has asserted that no, it is the opposite: we cannot clean our room (read: properly organise our mental space) when the world itself is a mess.[7]
How should we interpret this societal depression? Depression is always accompanied by a sense of hopelessness: things are not going well, and it seems highly improbable, or even impossible, that they will get better in the future. Uncoincidentally, this description perfectly captures the way a lot of us feel about the world right now. For instance, in a survey on eco-anxiety among Gen Z published in The Lancet, more than half of the sixteen to twenty-five-year-olds said that they believe humanity is doomed.[8] Taking this fact into consideration, the popular meme catchphrase that tells us we will live to see ‘manmade horrors beyond our imagination’ may start to make a lot more sense.
Meme-ing Through It All
In what way could memes be of help here? How do they contribute to ‘living a life that doesn’t include depression’? Firstly, an important aspect of memes is, of course, that they evoke laughter. Musical artist ‘Scoobert Doobert,’ whose practice revolves around popular internet imagery, says in an interview on memes: ‘I think that the human impulse to laugh is one of our greatest strengths just to cope with existence.’[9] In this sense, laughter can be seen as a distraction, even a form of escapism. But when I look at the memes that really speak to me personally, they often prominently feature the problems which frighten me the most, which is why the affective satisfaction they offer me cannot merely be a matter of escapism. Take a look, for instance, at the following meme:
I posted this meme on my Instagram story when the extreme-right political party PVV won the Dutch elections on November 22, 2023. Why did I reply to this tragic event with a joke? Probably because laughter, especially shared laughter, also creates a sense of community. In Scoobert Doobert’s words: ‘a joke is often an observation about the world, so when someone laughs at your joke, it's because they share some of your underlying assumptions about the way the world works.’[10] As a baseline, a meme garners some sort of interpersonal recognition: ‘There is the impression of there being someone else out there, someone who is like me but not me. […], the circulation of memes articulates the presence of an other.’[11] We know by now that misery loves company, and these types of memes express that, yes, we may be laughing together, but simultaneously we are acknowledging that a lot is (going) wrong with the world. So, this meme – known as ‘Dmitri Finds Out’[12] – helps me cope with the rising popularity of extreme-right politics in my country in two ways: it makes me laugh, which eases the pain, and it makes me feel less alone with my worries. Those who saw and liked my story might have had the same reaction: widening the circulation of the longed for ‘Other.’
Is there any limit to topics that can be ‘memed’ about? While writing this piece, I stumbled upon an Instagram post. It featured a screenshot of a tweet by the user @dutchlauren, an account belonging to Lauren Hoeve, a blogger who suffered from the chronic multisystem disease ME. Her illness was progressive, and her days mainly consisted of lying in bed. She decided that life was not worth living for her anymore, and last January Lauren was euthanised.[13] While most people probably cannot even imagine having to make such a decision, Lauren kept a sense of humour about her situation until the very end. She announced her decision to her followers by posting, you guessed it, a meme. Accompanied by the text: ‘This will be my last tweet. Thanks for the love, everyone. I’m going to rest a bit more and be with my loved ones. Enjoy a last morbid meme from me. ❤️ 😎 👍.’ The meme looked like this:
While Lauren’s tweet struck me in such a way that I felt I had to include it here, the fact that memes appear in – and out of – every possible context does not really surprise me. Memes have an addictive quality to them; they are susceptible to endless variation and, in many ways, they simplify conveying a message. Besides, truly anything can be turned into a meme, by anyone who wishes to do so.
Get Memed!
At times, I feel that memes have gotten into my head. By which I mean, that now and then, my thoughts and feelings are mentally transformed to fit into existing meme formats, or imagined as not yet existing memetic material. This also begs the question: who is really in control here? Citing Slavoj Žižek again: ‘Memes, misperceived by us, subjects, as means of our communication, effectively run the show (they use us to reproduce and multiply themselves) […].’[14] In other words, memes are not ‘used’ by us, they are active agents: penetrating our imaginations, forming our thoughts, and affecting our bodies, which they use as vessels.
In Kristoffer Borgli’s new film Dream Scenario (2023), we find an ad absurdum exploration of this concept. Nicolas Cage plays Paul, an archetypical anti-hero, who wakes up one day to find that he is appearing in the dreams of people all around the world. As a result, he goes massively ‘viral.’ Cage has said in an interview with CNN that this story is actually reminiscent of his real-life experience, having been ‘meme-ified’ himself when clips of his exuberant acting and facial expressions were widely circulating online.[15] In the film, Paul is at first delighted at the thought of starring in the dreams of possibly millions of people, but his life slowly but surely turns into an all-encompassing nightmare.
The employability of memes seems to be endless. Why do we meme? The answer could be anything, ranging from trying to ‘cure our depression,’ to coping with a disappointing or genuinely frightening election result, or even announcing that you will be euthanised. No matter the situation we find ourselves in, we can always resort to ‘meme-ing’ about it. At the same time, memes might actually be the ones in control, taking the form of a parasitic presence in our (collective) consciousness. Either way, it seems that most of us who are active participants of the web have formed, whether we wanted to or not, a special bond with memes, which might even be described as: ‘for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to meme and to be memed, till death us do part.’
Merthe Voorhoeve (2000) is an editor at Simulacrum Magazine and an art history student at the University of Amsterdam. She is interested in culture in the broad sense, and likes to view literature, visual arts, cinema, and internet phenomena through a curious contemporary lens.
[1] KnowYourMeme, “Pepe the Frog,” accessed February 8, 2024, <https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/pepe-the-frog>.[2] KnowYourMeme, “Socially Awkward Penguin,” accessed February 8, 2024, <https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/socially-awkward-penguin>. [3] Now called ‘X,’ courtesy of some idiot billionaire. I will, however, keep calling the website by its former name. [4] Chloë Arkenbout, Jack Wilson, Daniel de Zeeuw, “Introduction: Global Mutations of the Viral Image,” in Critical Meme Reader, eds. Chloë Arkenbout, Jack Wilson, Daniel de Zeeuw (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2021): 15. [5] Christine Ro, “How Linguists are Using Urban Dictionary,” Daily JSTor, accessed March 9, 2024, <https://daily.jstor.org/how-linguists-are-using-urban-dictionary/>.[6] ‘Committed die’ is typical ‘meme-speak’ (meaning: committing suicide), in which the bending or outright breaking of grammar rules adds to the comedic, and/or absurdist, value of the meme. [7] Iwouldprefernotto49, “Zizek Challenges Peterson: “Set Your House in Order Before You Change the World?”, YouTube, accessed April 21, 2019, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBMmcX-5INQ>. [8] Caroline Hickman et al, “Climate anxiety in children and young people and their beliefs about government responses to climate change: a global survey,” The Lancet 5, no. 12 (2021): [9] Max Horwich, “Masks, Monsters, and Memes: in Conversation with Scoobert Doobert,” in Critical Meme Reader (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2021): 85. [10] Max Horwich, “Masks, Monsters, and Memes: in Conversation with Scoobert Doobert,” 85. [11] Anthony Glyn Burton, “Wojak’s Lament: Excess and Voyeurism under Platform Capitalism,” in Critical Meme Reader (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2021): 19. [12] KnowYourMeme, “Dimitri Finds Out,” accessed 25 February, 2024, <https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/dimitri-finds-out>.[13] RTL, “Lauren Hoeve overleden: Als je leven geen geschenk meer is, mag je het teruggeven,” accessed March 1, 2024,, <https://www.rtlnieuws.nl/nieuws/artikel/5431589/lauren-hoeve-overleden-vermoeidheidsziekte-me-cvs-euthanasie-zondaginterview>.[14] Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times (London: Verso, 2011): 132. [15] KnowYourMeme, “Nicolas Cage,” accessed March 26, 2024, <https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/people/nicolas-cage/>.