March 2025 Meme Drought

About

March 2025 Meme Drought, also known as The Great Meme Drought of 2025, TikTok Great Depression March 2025 or The Great Meme Depression, refers to a series of ironic claims that there weren't any original memes going viral on TikTok in March 2025, leading to meta jokes about some of the memes created in that period as unfunny or unoriginal. The trend was started on March 10th, 2025, by TikToker @goofangel, which inspired edits and photoshops using pictures related to the 1929 Great Depression to describe what it was like living during the "great meme depression."

Origin

On March 10th, 2025, TikTok^[1] user @goofangel uploaded a video titled "TikTok Great Depression March 2025," claiming it had been "nine days into March and we haven't had a single original meme." He mentions that although the I Call Patrick Subaru meme went viral in 2025, the screenshot of the meme dates back to March 2021 and that it just "resurfaced" online. The video (seen below) amassed over 861,000 plays and 116,000 likes in four days.

Spread

The concept of a meme drought on TikTok was popularized online over the next few days as users started to "recycle" old memes or shared ironic meta jokes using real pictures of the 1929 severe global economic downturn, known as The Great Depression, to express what it was like scrolling on the video platform in March 2025.

For instance, on March 13th, 2025, TikTok^[2] user @de.novo12 uploaded a few old pictures from the Great Depression, writing, "How the great March meme drought will be described in the history books." The post (seen below) garnered more than 8,900 plays and 700 likes in a day.

On March 13th, 2025, TikTok^[3] user @mrllime posted an image featuring the faces of several TikTok content creators paired with the text, "When mfs say they grew up poor but never had to live during the great meme depression." The post (seen below) received roughly 459,000 plays and 86,000 likes in a day.

On the same day, TikTok^[4] user @zachlath posted a video describing how he feels while "sending bro TikToks during the great meme drought of 2025," amassing over 4 million plays and 1 million likes in a day.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References