Why Meme Origins Matter
Every meme you've seen shared 100,000 times started as something real. A stock photo, a Reddit post, a random video, someone's lunch. The internet took it, stripped out the context, added text, and it became a universal language. That's what makes memes powerful — they don't need explanation anymore. But the origin stories are worth knowing.
Here's what we know about where each meme in our catalog came from. Some are stranger than you'd expect.
Distracted Boyfriend — The Stock Photo That Ate The Internet
The photo was taken by photographer Antonio Guillem in Lleida, Spain in 2015. It's a staged stock photo — the kind commissioned to illustrate "workplace romance" or "relationship conflict." Guillem photographed three models: the man in the red shirt (the "boyfriend" being distracted), the woman in white looking at him (the "other woman"), and the original girlfriend in blue watching with visible frustration.
The photo was uploaded to Shutterstock and Getty Images and sat there for about two years. Then someone on Reddit discovered it and the meme format was born. The "distracted boyfriend" label stuck. People started labeling the three characters with whatever situation they were commenting on.
The meme peaked around 2017-2018 but has never really gone away. It's flexible enough to apply to any scenario — work distraction, food temptation, shiny new tech. It's the most reprinted meme format in history, with hundreds of variations on major brand accounts, news articles, and yes, t-shirts.
This Is Fine — The Artist Who Drew a Burning World
KC Green published a webcomic called "This is fine" in June 2013. The dog character — unnamed in the original strip — sits calmly in a burning room while chaos surrounds him. "This is fine," he says, in a panel where the walls are literally on fire.
The strip was about depression and denial — the idea of going through something obviously terrible while pretending everything is normal. It resonated. The four-panel format made it easy to spread, and the dog became a symbol for collective denial about climate, politics, housing markets, and everything else that was obviously on fire.
KC Green has said he's ambivalent about the meme's commercial uses — he drew it as a personal expression and it became a commodity. He still gets credited when people do it right, and the shirt sells, which is fine. The meme's meaning is stable: things are bad, but we continue.
Stonks — The Financial Meme That Became a Mood
"Stonks" is a deliberate misspelling of "stocks." The meme format comes from a 2017 YouTube video titled "PSA: Don't Buy Stocks on WeeWeeChat" by a financial education channel called minervinex. The thumbnail shows a man in a suit with a green rising arrow behind him, making a confident gesture.
The face in the thumbnail is Maksim Vladyka, a Ukrainian stock photo model. He apparently posed for many financial service stock photos, which is why his face shows up everywhere. The original video's advice (don't buy stocks on a random chat app) got completely ignored. People just focused on the suit guy's face and the "stonks" joke.
It evolved from a specific financial commentary into a general "things going well" indicator. "I did the thing and it worked — stonks." The green arrow alone is now used in thousands of contexts. Print a green arrow on a shirt and everyone under 40 knows exactly what it means.
Woman Yelling at Cat — The Meme That Shouldn’t Work
Here's the weird part: these two images have nothing to do with each other. They were never related. The woman is a screenshot from a 2010 episode of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills — specifically a scene where Taylor Armstrong is yelling at another cast member. The cat is "Smudge the Cat," a white cat who became famous on Reddit in 2018 for looking unimpressed at everything.
Someone put them together in 2018 and the internet couldn't stop. The format is used to illustrate any scenario where one thing is clearly not aligned with another: a decision vs. reality, a preference vs. judgment, a dream vs. the actual situation. The juxtaposition works because the woman's energy is so dramatic and the cat's energy is so indifferent.
The original Smudge the Cat account is still active. The cat has aged. The woman from Real Housewives has moved on. But the meme keeps being made. It was one of the most-saved images on Twitter in 2019 and continues to appear in new formats every few months.
Drake Hotline Bling — The Album Cover That Became a Meme
This one started as an actual album cover — Drake's 2015 studio album "Views." The image shows Drake in a Canadian tuxedo (Canadian tuxedo = full denim outfit), leaning against a wooden railing, looking displeased. It's a cold shot of the 6ix — Toronto in the winter.
The meme format crops Drake's face out and inverts the two panels. Top: things you reject (Drake disapproves). Bottom: things you embrace (Drake approves). The original disapproves are things that feel fake, derivative, or uncool. The approves are things that feel authentic or secretly brilliant.
What's interesting about this meme is that Drake leaned into it. He acknowledged the meme in press and in subsequent art. He became a meme protagonist who was in on the joke, which is rare. The meme format is still used weekly on Twitter and Instagram — it's one of the most durable image macros in recent memory.
Two Buttons — Panic Made Visual
Two Buttons comes from a 2017 Tumblr post by user @jzilla. The character is a generic "you" — an anxious person standing between two buttons with the kind of expression that says "I know I need to pick but what if I'm wrong."
The original post asked people to choose between two hypothetical scenarios, and the meme uses the visual format to illustrate every impossible decision. It's particularly popular in gaming communities and among people dealing with anxiety — because the meme is, essentially, about the paralysis of choice.
We added it to the catalog because the design is incredibly clean for screen printing. The character's expression carries the joke in one glance. It's relatable to a very specific kind of person who spends a lot of time considering decisions that probably don't need that much consideration.
Change My Mind — The College Campus Setup
The Change My Mind meme comes from a 2012 photo by Steve Martin. Martin set up a folding table outside a college campus with a hand-lettered sign that read "I would get snow cones out of a cup." He sat there with a cup of coffee and waited for people to argue with him.
The original photo is mostly about the absurdity of the claim — who has strong feelings about snow cone containers? But the format became "I will defend this position no matter what you say." It's about confidence in the face of absurdity, which is a very internet humor quality.
John Cephus, the man in the photo, has said in interviews that he doesn't mind the meme use. He's a comedian and was working a photoshoot that day. He got a viral meme out of it, which is not nothing. The sign's handwritten quality is part of the joke — it looks like someone really would sit there and defend it.
Surprised Pikachu — The Anime Reference That Became Universal
Surprised Pikachu is a screenshot from the 1997 Pokemon episode "The Electric Tale of Pikachu" — specifically the manga panel that the anime recreated. Pikachu's expression after encountering something unexpected became the universal "why are you surprised, this was obvious" reaction image.
This one works across age groups because Pokemon has been a cultural touchstone for over 25 years. Kids who grew up with Pokemon are now in their late 20s and early 30s — the core buying demographic for meme shirts. Surprised Pikachu means something to them and to their younger siblings who discovered the show on streaming.
The meme's versatility is in the application — it's always used when someone should have seen something coming but didn't. It's a meme about missing the obvious, which is extremely relatable.
Expanding Brain — The Format That Keeps Growing
Expanding Brain started as a series of images showing increasingly "enlightened" takes. The original format used photos of actual human heads and overlaid increasingly bright glows as the "brain" expanded. The format evolved to use cartoon heads with visible expanding brains inside them.
The format works because it's about being increasingly convinced of something that looks increasingly insane from the outside. "I used to think X, then I realized Y, then I understood Z, and now I have a galaxy in my head." The punchline is always that the most "enlightened" position is the most disconnected from reality.
It became a template for self-aware commentary — people use it to roast their own communities, their former selves, or their current obsession with something other people find ridiculous. The format rewards self-awareness, which is part of why it stuck.
What We Do at ShirtPost
We don't just put images on shirts. We track which memes have cultural legs — which ones are still circulating, still getting shared, still making people laugh two years after their peak. We don't print a meme shirt the week a meme peaks. We wait and see if it has a second life.
The designs on our shirts have all been circulating for years. They're not trend-chasing — they're trend-proof. That's the difference between a meme shirt you'll wear for six months and one you'll wear for six years.