Every Meme Dies the Same Death

Bad Luck Brian, Overly Attached Girlfriend, Scumbag Steve, Doge—there was a moment, brief and specific, when each of these was genuinely funny. Not just recognizable. Funny. That moment is always shorter than you think, and by the time you’ve registered it, it’s already gone.

Somewhere around 2013 or 2014 the whole meme economy curdled for me. Not because memes were getting dumber—they always were—but because the volume reached a threshold where the format itself became the joke, and the joke ran out. Every new iteration felt like someone doing an impression of a joke. First World Problems, Confession Bear, The Most Interesting Man in the World, Socially Awkward Penguin—the template spreads, the captions get worse, and the whole thing collapses under the weight of everyone trying to participate at once.

Mike Rugnetta over at the PBS Idea Channel explained this more rigorously than I ever could: memes have a built-in expiration date, and internet culture just keeps accelerating the decay. By the time something reaches your aunt’s Facebook feed, it’s already a fossil. What made the early ones work was a shared surprise—you encountered the image and the format simultaneously. Now the format precedes everything, and you’re just filling in a slot.

The part that really gets me is the people who don’t notice. Still making Borat references at parties in 2014, still cranking out "Shit People Say" videos six months after anyone cared. There’s something almost poignant about it—the lag between what’s alive and what someone thinks is alive. Most of the time I just want to press their head against something solid. Gently. Twice.