I Can’t Cope Without My Memes

Meditations on meme culture

Thank goodness for Donald Trump’s hair helicopter, the American Chopper guys’ outrageous fights and “My Best, My Worst” comparisons. Without all these memes, we’d all probably be in a deep, dark depression.

Things are bad, right? We have a country divided, a capricious White House, social media that’s betrayed us, businesses that can’t keep our data safe, and terrifying opioid crisis.

But we have Distracted Boyfriend to help us cope.

Memes, however, are more than just a coping mechanism for hard times. They’re the filter through which we interpret them. Like political cartoons before them (and maybe all New Yorker cartoons), they put a humorous, often exaggerated spin on our largest concerns, our greatest fears, our biggest conflicts, as well as our idiosyncrasies and many minor annoyances. Using outrageous or mundane imagery and text, they boil down our foibles to their simplest components.

While memes have been around since the age of UseNet, I didn’t become personally familiar with them until almost seven years ago when I joined Mashable, a tech, social media and business news site that frequently traded in Meme culture and news. As Editor-in-Chief, I quickly got up to speed on Nyan Cat, Scumbag Steve, Grumpy Cat, and Success Kid.