The Great Meme Drought of 2025

By: Christabel Ashun

What was the last good meme you saw in March 2025? You probably can't name any—and if you can, your fellow TikToker would probably have a completely different answer. That’s because there are no good memes left.

The life of the average meme on TikTok as of 2025 is five days, compared to memes in 2016 that could last months. Memes leave Memetok—the side of TikTok primarily focused on sharing memes—before people even have a chance to see them. This is the reality of the Great Meme Depression Era.

This era officially began in December 2024, as plans to “impeach” (or mass-unfollow) @vexbolts gained popularity, causing him to lose thousands of followers overnight. Vexbolts was widely unpopular for overusing memes and making them feel corny and forced.

After he was overthrown, January 2025 began with a surplus of new and creative memes. The number of memes increased exponentially in February. However, most were made out of desperation to seem different—the transition from 💔 to 🥀 was far from organic. It was a linguistic rebellion to avoid the mainstream from finding memetok yet again.

The pattern remains depressingly consistent: subcultural movements become commodified and commercialized into oblivion. In 2017, what began as 4chan’s surreal absurdism was so overdone by Instagram users that it lost all of its original substance. By 2025, this was repeated as Memetok creators desperately tried to preserve their corner of the internet through increasingly niche media.

The harder they fought to maintain a false sense of authenticity—whether in 2017 or 2025—the more their communities began to collapse in on themselves.

Ironically, the lack of memes has become a meme in and of itself. It’s abundantly clear that even after the end of this meme drought, people are still repeating the same cycles that caused it in the first place, such as creating fake slang just to seem different from mainstream users.

The cycle is inevitable, given the means of production under which memes are created, making it one of the only constants across all forms of meme culture.