This Week Feels Like a Panic Attack and the Memes Know It
Meme culture isn’t coping anymore—it’s confessing. Here’s what your feed is really trying to say.
📲 Oh Shit, My Feed Is Just My Nervous System
At some point in the last month, the internet stopped being funny-ha-ha and started being funny-oh-no.
The memes didn’t change. We did.
Suddenly, every joke felt like it had a basement full of feelings.
The most viral posts are no longer just punchlines—they're soft little spirals wrapped in 15-second sound bites. We're laughing, yes. But also rocking back and forth in a bathrobe we haven’t washed since June. Let’s examine the current internet mood board.
Exhibit A: “Me when I say ‘no worries’ but there are in fact several worries.”
This meme is not new. But it’s having a renaissance—because we are all trying to rebrand our anxiety as likability.
The subtext: “I am unraveling, but I’m fun about it.”
Exhibit B: “I don’t dream of labor” meets “I’m on my sixth side hustle because eggs are $9.”
This is the cognitive dissonance sandwich we all keep eating:
🧠 Belief: Work is exploitation.
💳 Reality: Capitalism charges rent.
🐀 Mood: Rat race, but make it romantic.
If meme culture used to be a coping mechanism, it’s now a shared hallucination with punchlines.
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🫠 Exhibit C: “No thoughts, just vibes”
aka “I’m a girl (or a dog)” in the “I am no longer a person, I am a Pinterest board” sense.
This one is everywhere—from burnout girlies to girl dinner dads.
It’s cute. It’s chilling. It’s also a full dissociative state dressed as a meme.
We Interrupt This Mem-verse Slay for a Very Important Message:
Disney has Mickey.
Nintendo has Mario.
Shitshow Creative has Carl the Manatee.
He’s emotionally intelligent, professionally unhinged, and floats through the cultural collapse like a blobby king.
Now you can wear him on your body.
🐳 Carl T-shirt now available in aquamarine (or the existential color of your choosing):
👉 Buy Here
Soft cotton. Unironically iconic.
Perfect for sweating through capitalism with dignity.
Exhibit D: “Charlotte, we need to bring the empire back.”
The caption that launched the meme into orbit.
The tone? Lighthearted.
The subtext? Historical horror show.
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Because nothing says “vibes are off” quite like a child channeling the ghost of Queen Victoria during a tennis final.
We weren’t just watching a sporting event.
We were watching a soft-focus funeral for British dominance.
And George? He was the pallbearer in Ralph Lauren.
Send Us Your Meme Moments
Got a TikTok clip, meme image, or greasy screenshot of a trending “I’m fine” video that hit your brain like a ton of existential bricks?
Send it to ➤ jem@shitshowcreative.com or DM @shitshowcreative
We’ll feature our favorites in next week’s edition. Bonus: emotional debrief included (no filter).
We used to joke about anxiety. Now we just live it.
Memes are no longer just coping—they’re confessionals.
If you’re sharing them, you’re not alone.
But if all we do is share—we might never heal.
These memes aren’t just random trends. They’re communal trauma dumps.
Tiny, digestible cries for help that don’t feel too heavy to repost.
We are collectively:
Too tired to explain
Too overwhelmed to scream
Too online to log off
So we meme.
Not to cope—but to signal that we are coping.
The Memes Hit Differently Now
Because we no longer believe things will "go back to normal."
We’ve been through too many loops.
Plague → layoffs → fascism → AI → burnout → therapy speak → vibes
Now, instead of trying to “fix” things, we just send each other content that says:
“Same.”
“LMAO this is me.”
“I felt this in my spleen.”
We’ve moved from information economy → attention economy → relatability economy.
And the currency is pain in pastel font.
We must meme responsibly.
We notice. We don’t normalize.
We meme responsibly.
We make space for the breakdown behind the joke.
We hold our friends when they send us a “funny” video that’s clearly a psychic unraveling.
And maybe—just maybe—we stop trying to be so good at pretending we’re okay.
TL;DR
The memes are getting louder
Everyone is funny, anxious, and emotionally singed
Humor is how we metabolize doom
You’re not broken—you’re just terminally online
Log off. Or don’t. But know the difference between a joke and a cry
We’re not just in your inbox
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