Memes are an online cultural phenomenon that spread fast like an Internet “in-joke.” These are jokes that organically happen and cannot be commercially produced. Over the years, they have also become a great way to learn about big events that have taken place.

In the early days of the Internet, memes were images and GIFs being shared on forum sites. These often included relatable scenarios that utilized established memes to represent such. For instance, if you’re feeling down on your luck, you’d type what happened and use an image of the Bad Luck Brian meme. Others would even take the time to make their own comics, known as rage comics, to paint a scenario that others might have gone through. Sometimes they came in the form of a viral video that would spread like wildfire. Many popular creators of the time like Smosh, Ray William Johnson, and Ryan Higa were just random personalities posting funny videos they made with their friends on YouTube. These early creators’ main goal was to simply make funny videos and people who would stumble across their content would start sharing it with other friends. Early memes from this era of the Internet had a staying power of more than a year as folks would build upon the original content and sometimes unknowingly create their own type of meme in the process.

With the evolution of the Internet, the birth of memes started to speed up. These days, there’s almost a new meme every week making it difficult to keep up with. Humor has also become so flexible for younger generations that something as simple as the mere mention of a letter from the alphabet could cause a laughing fit. To show just how ridiculously surreal memes can get, last year’s biggest meme was of a singing head popping out of a toilet. Skibidi Toilet was so large that an entire movie and television series by Michael Bay is now in the works to cash in on its fame.

Memes tend to die once the joke becomes commercialized. People lose interest in it as the inside joke becomes a corporate mascot. It loses the genuine care and thought process, or lack thereof that made the meme relatable and funny to begin with. As more people try to chase clout and crave attention for monetary gains, we lose the whimsical silliness that came with the early Internet. As more brands and corporate entities try to purposefully create viral content and monetized trends for social media, we are slowly witnessing the death of the Internet meme.

Though there is still hope. As younger generations continue to evolve, so too does their humor. While we may start to see trends and memes from younger generations that might not make sense, we are also witnessing a birth of new cultural trends and humor that kids these days are at the forefront of. Scary as it may seem to some, it’s an exciting time to witness this absurdist culture evolve into new forms of humor. This is their time now and it’s time for us older generations to sit back and let them take the rein to crazy new heights we could only dream of back then.