Uni Life

Submission 850

About

Uni Life refers to a series of memes based on stereotypical posts presenting university and college life as stylish and glamorous, with memes parodying these posts and presenting uni life in a more negative, self-deprecating fashion. Spawned in 2021, the caption meme format had recurring popularity on social media, primarily on X / Twitter.

Origin

On April 14th, 2021, X^[1] user @parisandior posted four photographs meant to represent the life of a university student, including a picture of an open laptop next to a cup of tea and a notebook, a photograph of two fruit cups, an image of a pasta dinner and a glass of wine, and a photograph of a study table. The post (shown below) received over 12,000 reposts and 17,000 likes in three years.

More similar posts captioned "uni life" were made by various accounts in the following years, including a January 15th, 2023, viral post by X^[2] user @fulminarey (shown below, left) and an April 12th, 2024, post by X^[3] user @ArtCelineLove (shown below, right).

On April 17th, 2021, X^[4] user @rusu_adri quoted the post by @parisandior with the earliest parody (shown below). The post gained over 15,000 reposts and 19,000 likes in three years.

Spread

The January 2023 post was followed by multiple parodies of it going viral. For example, on January 19th, 2023, X^[5] user @etherealmyths quoted the post with an illustration from Franz Kafka's novella The Metamorphosis, with the post garnering over 83,000 reposts and 550,000 likes in one year (shown below, left). On January 20th, 2023, X^[6] user @Franken_Sama made a parody post that garnered over 5,000 reposts and 12,000 likes in one year (shown below, right).

The format again went viral in April 2024 with parodies of @ArtCelineLove's post, and again in mid-August 2024. For example, on August 17th, 2024, X^[7] user @KenkenIsTaken posted a meme based on a clip of the indie game Buckshot Roulette that received over 37,000 reposts and 260,000 likes in two days (shown below).