Richard Dawkins, Hallmark Cards, and 10.7 Billion Views

I need to tell you something about memes that might ruin the internet for you.

In 1976, a guy named Richard Dawkins wrote a book called The Selfish Gene. In it, he coined the word "meme." Not for funny cat pictures, but for a unit of cultural transmission. An idea that replicates, mutates, and survives. He was talking about evolution, not your timeline.

Here's why that matters to me.

I built a project on Giphy that hit 10.7 billion views. Billion, with a B. And the thing that made it work wasn't cleverness, wasn't design, wasn't some growth hack I learned from a Twitter thread. It was birthday GIFs.

Yeah. Birthday GIFs.

Think about it. Every single day, someone you know has a birthday. You want to send them something. You search "happy birthday," grab a GIF, drop it in a chat. Tomorrow, someone else does the same thing. It's a loop. It replicates. Not because it's funny, but because it's attached to a human ritual. Nostalgia. Celebration. The feeling of being remembered.

That's a meme in the Dawkins sense. Not a joke. A survival machine for an emotion.

I basically built the modern-day Hallmark card and didn't even realize it at first.

Now here's where most people get it wrong. And I know this because I got it wrong too.

When I started, I thought the game was views. Impressions. The big number. And listen, 10.7 billion is a delicious number. It tastes like the crispiest piece of fried chicken you've ever had. That first bite where the crunch is so loud people at the next table look over.

But here's the thing about fried chicken: if there's no meat under the breading, you just paid for air.

I had a post on LinkedIn go to 4 million views. Four million. And my comments? Full of job seekers. People asking me to review their resumes. People looking for work.

That's not my audience. I wanted founders, business owners, experts who treat LinkedIn like a marketing and sales tool. I set a table for a dinner party and a flash mob showed up. The food was good but nobody sat down.

That's what I call the candy problem. New creators, especially the ones who are just getting started, they chase the dopamine. They see the numbers go up and it feels like winning. It feels like that first sip of boba tea when the tapioca ratio is absolutely perfect. You think: this is it. I've made it.

But dopamine is dessert. It's not the meal.

The meal is replication. The meal is building something that spreads because it's fit. Not funny, not clever. Fit for the emotional environment it's entering.

Mukbang videos don't go viral because people love watching strangers eat. They go viral because eating alone is lonely, and watching someone eat makes you feel less alone. This isn't me being poetic. Researchers actually studied this. Choe's 2019 study in Language in Society found that mukbang viewers treat hosts as "meal mates," alleviating real-life loneliness through a screen. Kircaburun et al. confirmed the pattern in Psychiatry Investigation: loneliness is one of the strongest predictors of mukbang watching. People aren't watching for the food. They're watching for the company.

The surface — a person eating — is never the thing. The thing underneath is loneliness looking for company.

Birthday GIFs aren't about birthdays. They're about the feeling of being the person who remembered.

A meme that works isn't content. It's a Trojan horse for an emotion people already want to feel.

So if you're a creator or a marketer reading this, here's what I want you to sit with: What's the emotional current underneath what you're making? Not the topic. Not the format. The current.

Because Dawkins didn't say memes survive by being the loudest. He said they survive by being the fittest.

And fitness, in this game, isn't about how many people see you. It's about how many of the right people can't stop sharing you.

I'm still thinking about what that means. I'll let you know when I figure it out.

— String

P.S. Every time you walk past a KFC, think of me. I'll explain why later.