A Cool Rock

About

A Cool Rock refers to a series of memes involving people who either think about cool rocks, find cool rocks or want to keep cool rocks. Such memes have appeared online in many different forms over the years, with the common link between them being a reference to "a cool rock," which is a common cliche many express. Starting much earlier, references to cool rocks in memes can be found in early 2014 and continued to see usage into the mid-2020s.

Origin

Being used colloquially as a common reference between people for years, one of the first instances online referencing cool rocks was the Tumblr post by user Grumpysalmon.^[1] In the post, created on January 17th, 2014, the phrase is said that "the average male thinks about a cool rock roughly every 15 seconds" while underneath that is an image of Dwayne 'The rock' Johnson shown doing the U symbol (shown below).

Spread

Memes about cool rocks continued to be relevant online throughout the years, with different ways to reference cool rocks being used as the sentiment was memed. For example, on December 7th, 2019, Redditor u/grubgrubgrubgrub^[2] uploaded a picture to the /r/animemes subreddit of the characters from School-Live looking down, with the caption reading that it's what the poster and their boys act like when they find a cool rock, earning over 6,300 upvotes in four years (shown below).

A staple usage in cool rock memes, finding a cool rock and showing it to a parent or other person, continued to be one of the most common references throughout the years. On July 9th, 2023, a since-deleted Redditor^[3] uploaded a meme to the subreddit /r/memes featuring characters from the show 6teen. In the meme, the character Jude is showing Jen a rock, with object labeling showing that Jude is the meme creator showing his mom a cool rock he found, earning over 1,100 upvotes in six months (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References