I'm Obsessed with this Stupid Meme
As readers of this blog and members of my Facebook group Society for the Toleration of Nathan Rabin are well aware, I am morbidly fascinated by memes, the worse the better.
I’m particularly fascinated by motivational memes, preferably featuring either Joker or Rowan Atkinson, offering absurdly reductive, simplistic advice on how to survive and thrive in the Darwinian realm of late-stage capitalism.
It’s all about the hustle with these people. It fetishizes the grind, the idea that if you’re not constantly working and plotting and scheming then you are failing the benevolent Gods of the free market and do not deserve to get ahead.
I am absolutely fixated on a meme from the good folks over at @SuccessPictures. Under the words “Work Hard in Silence, Let Success Make The Noise” are four panels, two of which are nearly identical.
In the first panel a grinning man is multi-tasking in impossible ways. Like a one man band, but for business, he’s simultaneously talking on an iPhone, looking at his address book, signing documents and looking at a computer screen with various business charts on it while the sun blazes in the morning sky.
In the second panel a pair of anonymous gentleman distractingly wearing the exact same outfit share a thought bubble with the man from the first panel in between in between two question marks.
As I mentioned earlier, the third panel is the exact same as the first except that it’s darker because it’s night but the gentleman is still somewhat confusingly apparently working on the same project as before and has apparently made no progress whatsoever but is grinning like a fool all the same. In the final panel we see the reward of all that hard work: while his idiot friends walk like poor jackasses, he’s driving an expensive sports car, a god among men.
I know what the meme is trying to communicate. I’m aware of the story it is trying to tell: a plucky everyman worked day and night instead of having a personal life like a lazy loser and because of all that hard work, he enjoys the finer things in life and is able to impress his less motivated and hard-working peers with his material success.
That’s what the meme is TRYING to say. It actually reads much differently to me. To me it looks like a goonishly grinning man with three arms works on the same project morning and night without progress or completion, and makes so much money that he’s able to surprise his friends with a car that’s on fire.
The artwork here is so hypnotically terrible that it conveys a scenario much different than intended. It’s a work of accidental surreal genius on par with Ben Garrison’s legendary crying basketball memorial cartoon for Kobe Bryant.
This inspirational image makes me want to work 24 hours a day so that I make enough money to afford an expensive car that’s on fire. It helps that I have three arms and also that I never need to sleep!
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