Memes Are Basically Therapy For My Generation

 

I am twenty two and my camera roll is mostly memes. My phone has screenshots of conversations and a folder named for later that I never open. But the memes I saved have told me more about my life than most of my own journal entries. Somewhere between the scrolling and the laughing I realised that memes are how we say the things we are too tired to say out loud.

Take relationships. There is a meme for every stage of modern love and all of them hurt. The one about typing a long message and then deleting it and sending a single hey. The one about being left on seen while the same person posts a story two minutes later. The situationship meme where two people are not dating but are also definitely not not dating. I have sent that one to three different friends and each of them replied with a skull emoji. That is how I know it is universal. We laugh because the alternative is admitting that we are all confused about what we want and what we deserve.

Then there is the meme about being the therapist friend. Everyone comes to you with their heartbreak and you give brilliant advice. Then you go home and ignore every word of it in your own life. I have lived this meme. I once talked a friend out of texting his ex for an entire hour and then texted mine at midnight. Nobody is more qualified to fix your love life than someone who has not fixed their own.

Career memes hit even harder. Every fresher knows the job posting that asks for three years of experience for an entry level role. Nobody has ever explained how a twenty two year old is supposed to have that. Then comes the LinkedIn post template where someone is humbled and thrilled to announce a new chapter. I have started to read these posts like a comedy genre. Underneath the humble tone there is usually a person who sent two hundred applications and cried once in a bathroom.

The Sunday scaries meme is the one I feel in my bones. Saturday night is pure freedom. Sunday afternoon is fine. Then at around six in the evening a quiet dread climbs up your spine and you begin to bargain with time. Another one is the meeting that could have been an email. I have not even entered a real corporate office yet and I already feel this one deeply. It tells me that my generation is entering the workforce with a very clear idea of what wastes our time and a very unclear idea of how to say it politely.

Indian memes add their own special pain. Sharma ji ka beta is a meme but also a lifelong comparison. Relatives ask about marriage and package in the same breath at every family function. The engineering or medicine or MBA joke is funny until you realise it is just a polite version of how many of us were pushed into paths we never chose. The meme gives us permission to laugh at pressure that nobody ever let us question at the dinner table.

And then there are the three in the morning memes. The ones about replaying an awkward thing you said in eighth class. The ones about promising to sleep early and then watching reels until the birds start singing. The ones about starting the gym on Monday and then being a changed man until Wednesday. These are small and silly. They are also honest in a way that motivational posters never are. A meme does not ask me to become a better person by tomorrow morning. It just says me too.

That is why I think memes matter. They remind us that being lost at twenty three is normal and that everyone is quietly panicking about money and love and purpose. Nobody has the clean timeline that social media pretends they do. When I send a meme to a friend I am really saying that I see them and I am struggling too. That is a small act of care wrapped in a joke.

So the next time someone tells you that you spend too much time on memes you can tell them this. You are not wasting time. You are doing emotional research. You are finding out that you are not alone and sometimes that is the only thing you needed to know before getting up and trying again.

-Maitrayee Repal