Ironically a meme isn’t even a meme in its original sense anymore. Richard Dawkins coined the term in The Selfish Gene in the 70s to mean something like a social gene that gets passed along (he was trying to understand why some behaviors, from an evolutionary perspective, seemed to make no sense but, somehow or other, were found to be very common in human societies)
this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2026
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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He defined memes as any kind of non-genetic information that is shared and spread by humans. So even what people will define memes as now are still memes in the sense Dawkins defined it as. Just about the only thing we do that isn't a meme, is having children.
@Kolanaki@pawb.social He also said that memes mutate and evolve in a way analogous to genes. The concept of memes has itself mutated and evolved to the point that it nowadays most commonly refers to recognisable image macros (though in the Dawkinsian sense, an image macro is not actually a meme, but rather an instance of one meme).
@artifex@piefed.social
Hmmm, is the argument that any and all conceptual ideas are memes?
So long as they spread and mutate, which I think the idea of memes has.
It's like saying word is a word.
When i opened the post i hoped to be blessed with wisdom. Is that all?
You're a meme
Actually, that's pretty much the only thing not a meme, since OP was presumably created by sharing genetic information.
You just started reading this sentence and it's already over.
Please elaborate