A popular meme format was pronounced dead Thursday afternoon after Ron Kessler, 58, deployed it in the Kessler Family group chat with flawless timing, correct context, and what witnesses describe as “genuinely good” word choice.
The meme, which had spent nearly three weeks as the internet’s dominant way of expressing mild disappointment, was reportedly in good health as recently as Wednesday, when it was used by over four million people to complain about Mondays, airports, and a specific brand of yogurt.
“It was thriving,” said Kessler’s daughter, Maddie, 16, who first saw the message while in a school hallway. “And then my dad used it about the dishwasher. And it was right. He didn’t use it wrong. That’s what I can’t get over. If he’d used it wrong we could have survived that.”
Witnesses say Kessler paired the format with a photo of a dishwasher his wife had loaded “the chaotic way” and added a caption that, according to everyone who saw it, landed perfectly.
Maddie’s brother Tyler, 19, left the chat within four minutes.
A brief life
Born on a forum at roughly 2 a.m. on September 28, the meme rose quickly from niche in-joke to mainstream staple, passing through the standard stages of internet life: discovery, saturation, ironic use, ironic use of the ironic use, and brand accounts.
“Brand accounts are usually the beginning of the end,” said a researcher at the fictional Center for Format Mortality. “But a brand account using a meme is like a cold. A parent using it correctly is like being hit by a bus. There’s no recovery from that. The format has been seen by the wrong eyes and understood by the wrong mind.”
In a brief statement, Kessler said he “saw it a few times and figured out the vibe,” a sentence that has been described by multiple teenagers as “violent.”
Survivors
The meme is survived by several derivative formats, including a version with a cat, a version with a different cat, and a version that is just the word “anyway” in a large font. Mourners have been asked not to use any of them in the family chat.
Funeral services will be held on every platform at once, followed by a reception where someone will inevitably post the meme one more time, ironically, as a tribute, and kill it again.