Why I Should Throw This Plastic Six-Pack Ring Into the River

About

Why I Should Throw This Plastic Six-Pack Into the River refers to a parody infographic by meme creator Welcome To My Meme Page that humorously and bluntly explains their motivation behind throwing a six-pack ring into a river. Posted in 2018, the meme has been used as an exploitable format, with its text and imagery often replaced.

Origin

On July 31st, 2018, meme creator Welcome to My Meme Page posted a parody infographic titled "Why I Should Throw This Plastic Six-Pack Ring Into The River" to Instagram^[1] and Facebook,^[2] where it garnered over 6,700 likes and 6,400 reactions and 3,200 shares in six years, respectively (shown below). The infographic listed "I don't want it" and "The river is right there" as the reasons explaining the decision.

Spread

The image saw viral spread through reposts on Reddit, X, iFunny and other social media sites in the following years. On January 27th, 2020, Redditor fatheranarchy13 posted the earliest discovered derivative meme based on the image, a joke about PragerU that gained over 15,000 upvotes in the /r/ToiletPaperUSA^[3] subreddit in five years (shown below).

The image did not achieve notable use as a meme format until October 2023. On October 14th, 2023, iFunny^[4] user Hungrysithlord posted a Star Wars edit of the image which received over 11,000 smiles in one year (shown below).

Following this edit and its viral spread, the image achieved more use in memes on social media, including X and Reddit.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References