Despite being imagined as something temporary, memes can be surprisingly durable. Some spend years travelling across countless corners of the internet. If they were truly so fragile, they wouldn’t survive the journey. Still, it’s important to remember that no meme lasts forever. Trends shift in days, sometimes hours, and even the digital infrastructure that delivers it to us is far from indestructible. Those cables and servers can suffer in all kinds of ways. We can’t really know whether the content we scroll through today will stick around or be lost to history, and that’s a pretty wild thought.

Still, let’s not let ourselves get too existential about it. We’re here for one reason, and one reason alone: to enjoy some light, mindless entertainment. That is easy enough to deliver, as the examples below make clear. Honestly, where would we be without these little distractions to keep us going through each day?