It’s 2017 and the meme invasion is undeniable. No walls, prayers, or executive orders could prevent our society from being infiltrated by the memes that have settled in around us. In fact, our culture has already adapted to include these memes, so I suggest we continue to learn more about them instead of letting our fear cloud our humanity.

A few years ago, Facebook was mainly photos and awkward status updates, with memes few and far between, but the conditions of the past couple years were fertile for a proliferation of memes and their culture. Today, we cannot scroll through our Facebook feeds without encountering entire parades of memes. And these parades are highly attended, as evidenced by likes, comments, and tags.

As a result, memes have integrated themselves into the crucial fabric of our friendships. In fact, I’m not sure how we ever maintained friendships in the pre-meme era when we could not tag our friends below images as a heartfelt reminder that a conglomerate of pixels captured their essence perfectly and caused us to think of them. If your friends don’t tag you in memes, do you even have friends?

In talking to one avid scholar of meme culture, I learned that memes have even co-opted facets of our religion. For example, integral to the fabric of meme culture is the holy trinity of frog memes: dat boi, Kermit, and pepe. Other scholars specialize in studying meme origins and popularity over time.

While we’ve accepted these memes into our lives somewhat uncritically, some may argue that memes may be attempting to weaken our morale. The “my life is in shambles" memes present themselves as highly relatable, and it’s appalling to see so many humans say “This is so me” below an image of a person barely keeping their sanity intact. With increased exposure to the radical notion of it being ok to have things be a little outside our control, who knows to what degree of shambles our lives may degrade.

I don’t think people are as malleable as the prior view may suggest, but I suppose it is important to be aware of the effects memes are having on our lives. For example, some memes work to enforce current societal biases and discriminate against entire groups of people. Memes latch onto images of people who don’t match conventional beauty norms and then hold them up as poster children of those who are undesirable, and we laugh, unaware that the meme exterior merely covers up a human interior- a human being with feelings.

Memes come in all shapes and sizes, and they have very real impacts on the way we live our lives, but we certainly shouldn’t live in fear of them. In fact, they are very useful tools for helping people to understand the way we feel. It is difficult to express how we feel with our words, so a quick snap of Kim Kardashian’s emotional or Kanye West’s emotionless face can really do the trick.

To emphasize how widespread meme culture has become, even Colgate, a small college in the middle-of-nowhere New York, has recently acquired a meme Facebook page, Colgate Jugz, creating a caring community for all meme aficionados.

We may not like the notion of memes changing the way we interact, think, feel, and see the world, but memes have benefits for our society. We should be meme-literate, but it might be overreacting a little to begin extreme vetting of our meme consumption.