You’re bored. What’s the first thing you do? Not, what do you want to do but what is the first thing that you physically do? You pull your phone out of your pocket, right? There’s barely any thinking done; it’s a knee-jerk reaction. You’ll open up Twitter or Instagram or Facebook or any of the other social media services and start scrolling.

It’s easy, it’s packed with content, and it’s cheap. But think about those posts that you’re scrolling by, occasionally deeming them enjoyable enough for a like, a retweet, a comment. Among all the personal sob stories, ads and vanity pics, there lies endless variations on the same concept: Comedy. It’s hyper-relatable, lightning fast and ultra-edited jokes. But god forbid should you show these jokes to your parents. Not that they’re inappropriate, (they almost always are — its comedy) but the basic tactic that they employ, the very platform on which they function, is incomprehensible to most over the age of 35.

They’re loud, abrasive and obnoxious, but we can’t get enough of them. They’re built to be shared, commonly directly asking you to ‘tag friends’ or ‘send this to someone who relates’, so they spread like cream cheese. Rarely longer than a minute, you’ll probably see hundreds over the course of a day, most being variations on the same clips or images. So why aren’t they palatable to the older generations? Well, spend ten minutes on any feed and you’ll understand why. Even the most internet adept have scores of memes flying over their head on any social board venture. The sheer mass of the internet community produces head spinning amounts of content every second. It’s chaos.

Here’s a good litmus test so you can see (or hear) it for yourself. Have somebody else scroll their feeds with their audio on. Sit away from them so you can’t see the screen, and within seconds there’s over-ripe bass rips, screaming, pop-culture sound effects, dog barks edited into popular songs, puking, fighting, anything and everything that’s loud and attention grabbing will be pouring through those phone speakers. Insanity runs free through this content, and everybody can’t get enough.

But let’s take a step back. How did we end up here? Why aren’t people scrolling through nature documentary clips, passages of beautiful literature, and videos of flowers growing while Mozart plays in the background? Well, they are, but those nature doc clips have been overlaid with trap music and contextual captions like “Me when my man comes home late”, and when the flower blooms it reveals an elderly Asian man infatuated with refrigerators. It’s a fever dream of self-referential absurdity, constantly being fueled by more and more uploads, re-uploads, re-edits and remixes.

Here’s the point, it’s reactionary. It’s crowd sourced commentary on the world around us, which hosts no shortage of the absurd. The Millennials and Gen Z were born into a world recovering from a century of death and conspiracy. Two World Wars, a cold one, the violent death of communism, the birth of broadcasting, and chaos from Russia down. A continuation of an era where truth was decided by those in power, and most people didn’t have the resources to question it. So people hopped in their respective camps, dug their heels in, and waited to die. We’re still experiencing it now, the mainstream media institutions admittedly taking political sides, and endless argument over semantics and personal attack.

And if you’re a kid or young adult in this time, something rings remarkably familiar. The endless bickering of children — not arguing for truth or for progress, but for personal notoriety and social status. Everybody wants to be the coolest kid in the lunchroom. And I think we’re experiencing the apex of that mentality right now. The internet has provided a bigger platform for it. But at the same time, sunlight is the best disinfectant, and as people get more infuriated by the inability of our thought and political leaders to do just that, the world will see a change. Revolutions aren’t pretty or glamorous, they’re chaotic and uncomfortable.

Now I’m not saying memes are a revolution, but I think they are a symptom of it. Most are apolitical and don’t have any sort of moral message whatsoever, and that’s a good thing. They’re a pure reaction to human experience in real time. What matters, what doesn’t, and what we are told should, all are eviscerated under the critical eye of the masses.

The ability for the internet to pass information is unprecedented, but so is its ability to satirize and criticize itself. The memes that populate our screen spaces are commonly meaningless and absurd, but they also speak priceless truths about us. So while the institutions around us put on a serious face and tell us our world and our values are in danger, we can begin to see that those establishments are the perhaps very thing holding us back. And so we laugh.