You open Facebook. After scrolling for a mere thirty seconds, you find yourself barraged by nonsensical images with even more meaningless text attached – it’s often inappropriate, or regarding the “inevitability of death,” or making prominent American politicians into some kind of punchline. It’s 2016 and you’re either sick of memes or you’re willingly following more and more meme pages. It seems that this divide is probably generational.

Consider the world that legions of Millennials were raised in: we haven’t known a world without war, we were mere children at the brink of the dot-com crash and we were maybe in middle to high school when the housing bubble popped. Many of us are conscious of the financial plights of our generation brought on by the size of generations preceding us, many of us are thousands of dollars in debt before we’ve even reached the age of 25. We’ve been watching the world shift for our generational duration and are just now getting the slightest of an opportunity at having a hand in the future. This isn’t to say we haven’t had advantages in some form, we’ve had an ally that preceding generations likely couldn’t even conceive the scope of when they were our age. We’ve grown up with the world at our fingertips: books are more available than ever, guides on how to do practically anything and most importantly, user-generated content and discussions. Never has there been an access point as large as the internet, never has there been a discussion that anyone in the world with only the qualification of having an internet connection could join. Thanks to the internet, we are in a constant think tank. Almost all millennials are considered “tech-savvy”, simply due to the fact that technology has grown up with us and our elders realized that this was the future. We had the typing classes that our predecessors had, but they were paired with lessons on Internet safety and how to use Microsoft Office. We may be suffering as we realize the world that we are inheriting, but we have solidarity through an invisible link that’s as real as we make it.

This is where things grow interesting, we’ve all had incredibly similar experiences, as can (probably) be said for most different generations. Given variations due to locales, there’s always intersections of experience. Yet, we’re the first generation that is able to share these experiences in a way that all of our internet-using contemporaries can see: enter the world of the memetic. This all ultimately boils down to a quick deviation to memetics – the study of replication in culture – and what this means for the modern individual. Put some thought into the implications of these things that we share and what they mean for communication as a whole. We’ve all heard the factoid-theory that we’re seemingly wrapping around from hieroglyphics to phonetic alphabets and back to pictures-for-language with the popularization of emojis (formerly the popularization of emoticons), and modern memes in their current meaning are no exception.

The way Millennials share information is a foreshortening of words, combined with small pictures, placed on top of larger pictures. Not only has this created a “new language," but it’s created a new philosophical viewpoint. This is where we wrap back around to the horrific world most early 20-somethings have been brought up in. Humor now lays at the center of what we think and believe, whether we want to admit it or not. This new philosophy is presented through memes/image macros and is constantly shuffling between the relatable, the nihilistic and the intensely positive in a dance that has been dubbed by some as “post-ironic.” It’s a term that comes off as particularly pretentious considering the concept it imitates: a culture in which it’s “ironic” to do things “ironically.” Our jokes are becoming our means of self-expression from personal to political fields, as witnessed by the outpouring of political memes spread across all corners of the web.

Many actively try to invalidate this form of expression, but it’s pretty clear that it’s a means of communication that has potential: politicians have jumped to memes in attempts to “relate to the youth,” a practice that often ends in the immediate “death” of the meme. There has already been discussion of “shitposting” – a form of memetic humor composed of allegedly Dadaist-like statements that reflect on society at large – as an anti-capitalist force (Zoe Sackman’s 2015 Term Paper entitled “Shitposting in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction” can be found by a quick Google Search, and although professionally unpublished, this is an academic subject with some bearing, judging by the popularity and spread of the paper). Does this make all memetic communication inherently political? Is this a continuation of the ironic, using a medium that “outsiders” to the current meme culture cannot understand, to protect ourselves from the hard lines of the world we occupy? Consider these things the next time you see an image of a dog in a flaming building claiming that “This is Fine” as a Facebook comment to some political scandal – we’re doing what we can to hold together long enough to try to get solutions. Our weird, infectious humor will be our saving grace until then.