If some of these pictures annoy you with their lack of meaning, I get it. Peter Gärdenfors, Ph.D., who is a professor of cognitive science at Lund University, Sweden, says humans are meaning-seeking animals.
"We have an unquenchable desire to understand how the world is connected. All cultures have myths and stories about how the universe was created and who has power over natural phenomena," he says. "In our modern world, we also have scientific theories about the factors that govern different types of processes. All humans, at some point, ponder the meaning of life."
"Psychologists talk about the will to power and the will to pleasure. But the will to meaning is at least as strong. In his book, Man's Search for Meaning, the physician and author Viktor Frankl writes, 'Man's search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a 'secondary rationalization' of instinctual drives. The meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone, only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy his own will to meaning.'"
So why do we search for meaning in virtually everything we do? To answer this, Gärdenfors says, we must understand why the human brain is built to search for connections even in the most random places.
"No other animals worry about meaning. So why must humans? If you want to follow Darwin and see humans as biological beings and a product of evolution, then our need for meaning has probably increased our chances of survival ... [But] reducing one of humanity's most profound qualities to counting the prizes in the evolutionary lottery may seem dry."
"Questions of meaning seem to be outside the domain of biology. In the modern debate, there is a conflict between, on the one hand, 'biologists' who argue that the causes of human behavior lie in the biological substrate and, on the other hand, 'humanists' who argue that it is culture and the search for meaning within culture that are the primary causes of human action," the professor explains.
Gärdenfors himself believes our unique meaning-seeking predisposition derives from the fact that we are the only animal that can plan for the distant future and not just for our present needs.
"For this, we need some long-term goal to motivate us to think about future consequences and not just live for the moment. As a species, we have now reached the point where our existence is fundamentally determined by these ideas—we are obsessed with thoughts of the future," he says.
When animals and humans plan for their daily needs, Gärdenfors says, the goals are proximate and their value is more or less obvious, but when our plans span over long periods of time, the goal becomes distant. It may not even exist or be of an unknown kind, and its value is much more uncertain.
"In such situations, we need more overarching values—moral, religious, ideological—to give meaning to the planning enterprise," he explains.
"In other words, the need for meaning comes from the uniquely human capacity for foresight."
But what does all of this have to do with memes? Well, like I mentioned earlier, don’t worry if you’re annoyed by not seeing meaning here because that’s sort of the point with these kinds of lists. Weird memes, especially the ones that feel completely absurd, are sort of an exercise in our need to find meaning where there might be none. They exploit our pattern-seeking brains, forcing us to search for connections, punchlines, or some other hazy "truths." A puzzle.
