About

If You Ever Feel Useless, Remember That This Exists refers to a phrasal template and series of memes that revolve around posting pictures of various things that are useless or unnecessary. Typically, these appear as image macros with variations of the caption “If you ever feel useless, remember that this exists,” often including an in-joke related to a particular interest or fandom.

Origin

The first examples to use the theme surfaced online around 2014, but the exact first is unknown. One of the earliest versions was posted on February 18th, 2014, by MemeCenter^[1] user honeylemonbunny, which depicted the Ryugyong Hotel in North Korea (shown below). The meme received over 3,000 likes and 120 comments in nearly seven years.

Spread

The format and associated phrase continued to spread in the following years appearing on most major sites and platforms. On June 11th, 2015, the Facebook^[2] page Thronies posted a version referencing the show Game of Thrones, receiving over 3,000 likes, 140 comments and 110 shares in over five years (seen below, left). On April 12th, 2020, the Instagram^[3] account genderfluid.pickle shared another example of the meme, receiving nearly 4,000 likes in eight months (seen below, right).

On August 27th, 2020, Facebook^[4] user Sarcasm posted a variant that received numerous other variations of the “Olympic swimming lifeguard,” accumulating over 323,000 likes, 28,000 shares and 4,600 comments in four months (shown below, left). On December 26th, Redditor BilboSwagginsDaGawd posted another example to the /r/cyberpunkgame^[5] subreddit depicting one of Cyberpunk 2077’s perks, accumulating over 33,700 upvotes, 1,600 comments and several Reddit Awards in 56 hours (shown below, right).

On December 27th, 2020, Twitter^[6] user lofiWav tweeted another variant depicting Super Smash Brothers ability to use the Nintendo 3DS as a controller, receiving over 8,400 likes and 950 retweets in 26 hours (seen below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

Unavailable.

External References