Memes are the future.
Older generations may look at a meme with confusion on their faces, wondering what humor can possibly come from a picture of SpongeBob overlaid with alternating upper and lowercase letters of text, but my friends and I bond over this. We send them to each other and laugh together over how much we relate.
Most students at the University know that it has its own personal and unique set of memes, which come from Instagram pages like @lsu_memes_for_acadian_teens and @lsu_memes_for_laville_teens.
Typically, these memes serve as nothing more than cheap laughs. On many occasions though, they become too real, too relatable; surprisingly, they can actually help keep you up to date on the latest news at the University.
These pages, as silly as they may seem, provide much-needed humor while still giving key information about life at the University through the form of memes, jokes and other creative outlets.
One day, I opened Instagram and saw a meme about completing fee bills for the semester. I laughed, as this meme expressed the panic a student would feel when they realized their failure to click a simple button had resulted in them not being able to pay their fee bill. It was then that I realized I hadn’t yet completed my own.
What was the moral of that story?
For those of us who don’t check our emails as often as we check our Instagram feeds (I am definitely talking about myself here), these memes become our first line of information sometimes. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve checked Instagram to find that inclement weather has led to class being canceled, and then proceeded to open up my email inbox to confirm the meme.
Yes, you read that right.
I am not ashamed of it either. These past two semesters have been rough for the entire student body. We have had to adjust pretty quickly to online and hybrid classes, navigating how to properly learn material through Zoom. These experiences have made for great meme-worthy material.
These memes unify us, even if only for a couple seconds. We can scroll through comment sections and see that we are not the only ones feeling this struggle.
We are not the only ones who hate Zoom classes. We are not the only ones who miss hanging out with our friends and attending sporting events at full capacity. One split-second of that realization is all we need. We look at the meme, we laugh at it; then we get back on our laptops and churn out a sea of words just in time for the deadline.
At the beginning of this column, I stated that memes were the future. But I was wrong. MeMeS aRe ThE pReSeNt!
Anthony Bui is a 20-year-old English major from Opelousas.