internet memes are the most beautiful invention of our digital age.
Currently, it’s 11pm and I’m stressed as fuck laughing at memes on YouTube. Just landed back in Oregon after moving back from Oakland, and I remember on a bus trip near the beginning of the stay, me and my friends were travelling by bus when Valkyrie mentioned one of her friends always thought about how when they got on a bus, they would likely never be around those people again.
That’s such a boring statistical miracle. You and strangers whose pasts you have no idea about, managed to cross over once. In a cosmic universe so vast and large, it’s so unlikely that honestly any human co-operation should have happened, and yet we developed trust and society.
When sharing a public space, you live in a slice of a stranger’s moment and you’re all in the same situation, experiencing the same sensations. Some of the most electrifying times to be a human is when a shared experience is laughed upon as a group. Today I was in Home Depot with my dad, and upon seeing the price of masking tape, I bellowed a curse, “What the fu-rickle frackle”.
A little girl passed by me with her dad in the middle of my sentence and the dad visibly laughed at my sudden shift. What a beautiful beneign moment.
I do talk lots of shit about the internet, but right now I’m just enjoying being a voyeur into the lives of others. It just brings so much joy to seeing videos of light jokes between friends, or crazy stories you may only hear during dinner parties (like watching a child saying curse words in a critical phase of their development).
I’m just so grateful the internet allows us to share things and to see things we never otherwise could have seen, proven, or believed. The desire to feel connected to other humans is stronger than I think it has been, and you can feel it ingrained in every part of the internet.
Down to messaging, social sharing, family accounts, content creators and the audience who loves them, e-mails, shared digital photo scrapbooks, and more. Everyone who works in developing and scaling products knows the best way to keep the product around (and the company alive) is for people to share or acknowledge it.
My late Grandma used to send me Christmas Cards that had grandiose animations through email.
At the time, I dismissed it as a cute gesture but as something with digital place in my inbox. Now, I wish I would have kept onto them, because I understand now that it was “Here’s a forever version of this card I want you to have”.
Being online is a terrible responsibility and a beautiful reminder of how fragile and diverse humans and their digital habitats are.
Enjoy this meme video I just watched, and take a moment to appreciate the joys and hidden milestones in every piece of content.
