# The Strange Rise of the Before-and-After Tragedy Meme  ## About - Author: Joshua Hunt - Title: The Strange Rise of the Before-and-After Tragedy Meme - Published: 2025-06-11 - Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/11/magazine/tiktok-tragedy-memes.html - Share: https://notes.peterfmcnair.com/the-strange-rise-of-the-before-and-after-tragedy-meme-by-joshua-hunt ## Excerpts **It’s very likely that** each of us will, in time, become the sole possessor of images like these — not just memories, but hard documentary evidence of the ordinary moment just before some irrevocable reversal of fortune. Accordingly, each of us will need to decide whether to become a *keeper* of this unfathomable document or a *curator* of it, as so many on social media have chosen. Both choices seem natural enough. The possibility that any of these tragedy memes are motivated by clout-chasing or engagement-seeking feels moot, given how ordinary clout-chasing and engagement-seeking have become. Besides, there is no way to share grief without seeking *someone’s* attention. Invariably, people will flip through the chronological photo libraries on their phones and feel a need to communicate the starkness of the before and the after: One morning a smiling young person is making silly videos, and by the next frame in the grid, everything is unimaginably different. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jxf4xq60wcfqvyckvfvqjfg1)) - Note: I like the idea of keepers and curators. --- Like most social media trends, this one will likely pass soon enough. Eventually the incentives that drive so many to post so often may shift, diminishing the lure of meme formats like this one. But even in the absence of the platforms and the algorithms, we will still be left to decide how much evidence of our own existence we can tolerate and how much we can bear having shared. One day, we will each have to live with the archives that we are making for ourselves — monuments dedicated to the spectacularly mundane lives we have lived, however consoling or discomforting they may prove in the end. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jxf559w2sk1rrekzxagspbef)) - Note: I do feel a bit like an archivist of my own life. Perhaps instead of focusing on documenting I'd be better off living. ---