People are not Memes
The feeling is all too familiar: you lie on the sofa, phone above your face, and bathe in the soft aquarium light of the almighty feed. Images rush past with charm, each clip presented as if it were made just for you. Then, for a moment, the spell slips: you notice how the images blur together, how the same sounds, captions and templates keep returning, jokes and dances changing only their costumes while the script stays entirely the same. In that moment it is easy to nod along with the line that people are “memetic”.1 The biologist Richard Dawkins gave that thought its sharpest edge in 1976, when The Selfish Gene proposed the meme as a new kind of copy: a tune, phrase or habit that spreads from brain to brain like a cultural gene.
From there, a simple story suggests itself: culture is just a huge competition between memes. The funniest joke wins, the catchiest song survives, the most repeatable idea spreads. We are the carriers; the memes do the living. Funnily enough, there is some truth in this. We do pick things up from each other all the time. But it is also too thin. When we copy, we rarely make perfect copies. We change things, misunderstand them, mix them with our own lives and interpretations. What lasts is often not a single meme, but a way of doing something: a style of humour, a way of talking, a sense of what ‘everyone knows.’ The story of memes sees the visible clip; it misses the habits and expectations underneath.
This is where Heidegger,2 a philosopher who died long before TikTok, helps. He said that a real work of art is not just ‘content’ that gives us a feeling. Rather it is something that sets up a world. A famous example of his is a painting of a pair of worn peasant shoes by Van Gogh. The painting is not important because it passes on ‘shoe information.’ It matters because, if you really look at it, you start to feel the whole life around those shoes: mud, fields, fatigue, pride, a way of standing on the earth. The picture does not just show an object. It reveals a way of living. In that sense, art does not simply sit in front of us. It shapes what we (can) see and care about.
Imitation works like that too. Think of an apprentice in a studio, copying a drawing. On paper, this is just one more copy in the chain. But what he really learns is how to hold the pencil, how to be patient, what counts as “good enough” in that craft. He is not just copying an image; he is slowly entering a way of life. When we repeat memes online, something similar happens, only faster and often more shallow. We are training ourselves in how to joke, how to show off, how to be seen. Memes may be small, but through our constant imitation they help decide what kind of world feels normal. The real question is not only which meme will go viral, but which way of living we build every time we hit “repost”.
Footnotes
- Memetic: From “meme”. To call people memetic is to say we tend to copy and spread ideas, styles or behaviours the way memes do.
- Heidegger: Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), a German philosopher who asked how our whole sense of reality is shaped, and who argued that art and technology change the way the world shows up for us.