What Your Favorite Meme of 2023 Says About You

2023 was the year of Charles officially becoming king, of the glory hole dad and the Roman Empire. And as night becomes day, it was also a big year for memes. You couldn’t mindlessly scroll past the detritus of Twitter, TikTok or Instagram without being confronted by the relentless ingenuity of your common man in memetic form. (Whether they’re actually good or not is a different story.)

So whether it was the pints, chit chat and good people lads riling everyone up with their performative carefree nature, the Family Guy revival or how our cuck obsession cucked our brains, our lives online have been in no small part informed by and distilled into images and videos that reflect the wider culture. 

The most-searched for memes speak to our deepest passions and desires. Luckily, we happen to know your top 10 meme searches this year, courtesy of exclusive data from Google. But what does it say really about you if you buzz off one particular meme over the rest? Read on to find out.

You love shoe-based rizz-related content. Damn Daniel and “What Are Those?” walked so you could run with one two buckle my shoe. You’re a 17-year-old lad who can withstand the nursery rhyme singing voice of the boy in the original, because that sound could bore a hole in a wall.

If you love fed-up Affleck, it’s because you see a kernel of a deeper, eternal truth in his constant exasperation with existence. You see him take a drag in a parking lot like his whole life hinges on it, and it lifts you up. You see him juggling boxes of Dunkin’ Donuts and an iced coffee outside his front door, wearing a look of pure exhaustion, and you sing. You see him slamming the car door behind JLo, with the stored anger from a thousand intrusive paparazzi moments, and you can’t help but feel relieved. He is us, and you are him, you think – you see yourself in him. You are a millennial who grew up with him, and now you too are exhausted and jaded. You see him struggle under of weight of life, despite the dream wife and the money and everything else, and you take solace in the inescapability of it all. Truly, we are all Affleck.

So if you’re loving disappointed Cillian Murphy memes in 2023, rather than, say, Oppenheimer – which seemed like a much more ever-present on my timeline??? – then you are surely really up for shagging him. You love the man’s whole on-screen oeuvre, and second-best to shagging him is delighting in his expressions at press junkets. You are fangirl-y by nature. You pepper the group chat with reaction Murphy memes to diminishing returns.  

If you are preoccupied with Ohio and the surreal meme formats that proliferated about the state this year, then you most likely live near Ohio. That, or you view Ohio as a Lynchian exemplar of the American dream gone awry, that not all is as it seems, and that it represents the badlands of American capitalism, and by extension, American culture at large. If you think that, though, you gotta at least be from the Midwest.

Either you hate philanthropy and don't have faith that Mr Beast is doing it out of the kindness of his heart or you love the guy and you’re rubbing lotion on the computer screen like this dude. The memes themselves are all over the place; the ones doing the rounds at the moment are about him trading his skin with people and swapping faces or something.  

You are a Russian child with a fire TikTok who loves Minecraft and Prime energy drink, or you are someone who got really into psychedelics over lockdown and has severely underestimated your daily microdose since about February.

If you’re in the more wholesome camp and you give a fuck, then you probably loved all the characters at the Coronation and the ~silliness of Britain made flesh in one extravagant pageant. Waitrose and M&S, and the way you feel when you’re inside them, is a core part of your personality. It’s BBC News at Ten, not ITV or any of the cable channels. “We pay for it with our taxes, and besides, it’s the official broadcaster,” you say. You orbit a cuddly world of Strictly and Bake Off; the Robbie Williams doc made you remember “the old” you, and seeing Fiona Bruce on-screen chiming in on antiques makes you feel some kind of way.

Or you’re anti-royalist and think Britain should be a republic, and you wear one of those fedora hats and always have playing cards on you.

You are either an anti-woke person with flags in your X bio who wants to show how cartoonish and Satan-adjacent Sam Smith looks in that pic, or you’re a queer person intent on showing how cartoonish and Satan-adjacent Sam Smith looks in that pic. Either way, you don’t condone the fit.

You love the little sheepish 90s smirk and plastering iterations of this meme all over the internet. You are a cheeky, habitual line-stepper and this meme format serves as your ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card when misreading the vibe on Hinge. For you, what James’ face communicates isn’t dissimilar to the meme that’s like: I’ve got that dog in me, and then the dog is a 19th-century impressionist’s oil painting of a sweet, cartoon-like pooch. The Kevin James meme is like Peaky Blinders and IPA for Gen Z.

If you were dealing in Prince Harry memoir reveal memes, or anything to do with the frostbitten dick part – which included a strange evocation of his mother – then you are a raging Royal Family truther. You want to see the lid being lifted on them; you want to see them make a tit of themselves, and you want to hear Harry – in his posho-albeit-Americanised accent – say icky stuff about his life, knowing he’s sold his soul for a big celeb book deal (the product of which became the most-traded in biography of the year, to boot).

@niche_t_