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Memes

The Philosophical Reasoning Behind Why We Locked Onto The ‘They Did Surgery On A Grape’ Meme

They did surgery on a grape.

In case you missed it, they did surgery on a grape.

Technically they did surgery on a grape back in 2010, or at least that’s when Edward Hospital uploaded the video to YouTube showcasing their robotic tool for micro surgery.

But the actual date of the surgery is of little importance to the world wide web. No amount of time lapsed could stop us from bowing down in awe over this magnificent event on the weekend.

The meme was born from an unassuming Instagram post by SimpleDorito, which simply featured the caption ‘they did surgery on a grape’ over a screenshot of the action.

From there things kicked off with impressive momentum. In near unison, the world exclaimed the astounding news. It was a disorientating time to log on though an easy ship to jump aboard.

But we are here to talk about why we locked on to the grape, and what the sudden obsession with the grape says about us. Open your mind, because the grape meme has levels.

First off, ‘they did surgery on a grape’ parodies the nature of the internet. Being online is like walking down a street filled with vendors shouting through megaphones, each pushing their respective content for their respective reasons.

As we wade through the deep waters of the internet, what we see ranges from relevant, to miscellaneous, to super f**king random. The grape is emblematic of the latter category.

The oddness of the grape’s medical story forces us to reflect on the absurdity of our virtual world. And as we virtually live the bulk of our lives online, by extension we are forced to reflect on the absurdity of our own lives.

Is this a life-well lived? Minutes, turned to hours, turned to days, turned to years, spent perusing an endless stream of content? Why must we constantly browse? What do we truly seek? Connection? Purpose?

A fleeting distraction from the pathetic emptiness of our meaningless, consumer-driven lives?

Let’s leave that existential crisis there for a moment and touch base with another level on which the grape meme resonates. Yes, this one also eventuates in an existential crisis, but the path there is much more upbeat, so at least there’s that.

Behind the widespread concern for the grape resides the question: why shouldn’t we care for the tiny fruit that is getting surgery? Who and what decides if one thing matters more than another?

We are haunted by an unavoidable awareness that the significance of a single grape is not so far off the significance of a single human, in the grand scheme of time and space.

And so, we are just a hop, skip and a jump away from the beloved philosophical question: does anything really matter?

Welcome to nihilism! It’s not all bad!

The belief that nothing matters, while arguably cynical, also helps to relieve the distress of merely existing in this doomed landscape we call Earth 2018™.

So here we are, faced with the meaninglessness of this thing called life and of course we deal with things the way we know how: we meme the grape.

Just as we grappled with the insatiable drive for self-fulfilment through the moth memes, we are attempting to process our existential crisis through a farcical micro-focus on the grape.

‘They did surgery on a grape’ is both the trigger and the catharsis for the existential crisis 2018 primed us for. It means nothing, it means everything, and it is a concise expression of exactly where we are at as a civilisation.

This is the world we have made, and they did surgery on a grape.