"Never Give Up" / Digging for Diamonds

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About

"Never Give Up" Cartoon, also known as Digging for Diamonds, refers to a motivational image showing two men in a diamond mine. The man on top is eagerly digging towards the diamonds while the second older man is dejectedly walking away, unaware he was close to reaching the diamonds. The picture circulated on motivational blogs in the mid-2010s before seeing use as a humorous exploitable meme template in image macros.

Origin

On April 5th, 2011, illustrator Dum^[7] originally posted the drawing to his Blogspot (shown below). It began circulating on motivational blogs in January 2012 unaltered from the original comic.^[1]^[2]

Spread

Over the course of the 2010s, the image was edited in various ways to include quotes about "never giving up" or similar sentiments (example shown below), prior to becoming a meme format.

On November 18th, 2016, Twitter user @cryptonoah_^[3] posted the image in relation to cryptocurrency, gaining over 20 retweets and 50 likes (shown below, left). A crypto-themed variation was posted to /r/dogecoin^[4] by Redditor CaroliiiinaChiick on February 9th, 2021, gaining over 20,000 points (shown below, right).

The image was also edited in numerous exploitable memes on social media in the following years. For example, on April 8th, 2021, Imgur^[5] user cantfindanyname posted a parody representing a man searching for the perfect explicit video on PH, gaining over 128,000 views (shown below, left). On November 7th, 2021, Twitter user @ijustbluemyself^[6] styled the image as a Demotivational Poster captioned "Keep Gambling," gaining over 7,800 retweets and 96,000 likes (shown below, right).

I Dropped X Because It Was Boring

I Dropped X Because It Was Boring is a caption template frequently used in conjunction with the Digging for Diamonds meme format, most commonly used to imply that a certain franchise is terrible. Spawned by a viral meme about One Piece, the format saw active use in 2022 and 2023.