How Life Feels When Drone Videos

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About

How Life Feels When Drone Videos, also known as How Life Feels When X or How Life Feels After X, refers to a TikTok trend and series of memes that were popularized in late 2023 and early 2024. The videos typically pair scenic drone footage of landscapes with text that follows the phrasal template "How Life Feels." The trend initially saw people using the song "Adventure of a Lifetime" by Coldplay, which was later replaced by MGMT's "Time To Pretend" in 2024. Later iterations of the meme tended toward ironically encouraging bad alcohol consumption practices.

Origin

Some early examples of TikTokers pairing scenic drone footage with a phrasal template that reads, "How life feels when" are posts by TikTokers @guyminaj^[1] and @hammooddyyy,^[2] posted on November 16th and November 30th, 2023.

Both videos used drone footage of scenic nature landscapes and the song "Adventure of a Lifetime" by Coldplay. The videos gathered over 6.5 million plays and 1.2 million likes (seen below, left) and 2.9 million plays and 500,000 likes (Seen below, right) respectively.

However, the earliest known instance of the phrasal template "How Life Feels" paired with the song "Time to Pretend" by MGMT to make a joke about being drunk is a January 18th, 2024, post by TikToker^[3] @fuckn.isaac. The video gathered over 6 million plays and 2 million likes in two weeks (seen below).

Spread

On January 18th, 2024, TikToker^[4] @digital.printfoot posted a video set to the song "Time to Pretend" by MGMT, showing a beach landscape and text that reads, "How it feels to start drinking again." The post gathered over 4 million plays and 900,000 likes in two weeks (seen below, left). A similar post by TikToker^[5] @whatatol82e on January 24th read, "How life feels while I'm eating a bagel." The video gathered over 16 million plays and 2 million likes in a week (seen below, right).

TikToker @eybmk posted several videos of nature drone footage set to "Time to Pretend," with a January 23rd, 2024, post^[6] gathering over 2 million plays and 300,000 likes and a January 24th post^[7] gathering over 5 million plays and 1 million likes in two weeks (seen below, right).