Sunday Essays #17: The Meme'd Shall Inherit the Earth

it could happen to you.

It wasn’t so long ago that I read an article about how the New York Knicks would struggle in the NBA Draft because of their recent history.

Plainly put, the Knicks had never been competitive in the entire lives of the current Draft class, so why would these up and coming players want to go there?

Growing up and living on Long Island, the Knicks had become something of a meme.

The Carmelo frenzy.

The mid-2010’s doldrums.

F Trae Young.

Knicks fandom, from the outside looking in, seemed to become a caricature of itself.

“It’s never going to happen for us, but let’s have fun with it in the meantime.”

Well, we know how this story turned out of late.

My how fast things can change.

Perhaps it’s something in the zeitgeist, because it happened across the pond, too:

The North London Bottling Company

If you were to tell anybody who watched the English Premier League over the last two decades you were an Arsenal supporter, you’d 100% get chirped.

Trophy droughts, blown leads both in matches and the standings, viral content of fans crashing out leaving the Emirates after yet another calamity on the pitch…Arsenal were a tried-and-true meme team.

4chan’s sports board has literally had a pinned Eternal Arsenal Thread for over ten years now, where fans can come in and commiserate over their suffering.

Then the 2025-2026 Prem season came upon us, and…

Years of memes, jokes, narratives and reputation vanished beneath one trophy lift.

Funny how quickly reality can make old jokes feel stale.

I’ve always believed that there’s an intrinsic link between energy and sports.

That the culture and trends reverberate off of the sporting world, and vice versa.

Maybe that’s nonsense, maybe I’m simply looking for patterns where none exist.

(It wouldn’t be the first time.)

But watching the New York Knicks and Arsenal F.C. win their respective league titles within weeks of one another (I still can’t believe I’m typing that sentence) feels oddly symbolic.

Two organizations that spent years as punchlines suddenly weren’t, and it got me thinking about how often this happens outside of sports.

We all know a meme team or two in our own lives.

As a collective, we do this constantly.

A person struggles for long enough and they stop being viewed as someone going through it or in a rough patch, and they start becoming the token Screwup.

Your roommate dates a few characters one summer and now she’s forever “the girl with an awful taste in men”.

The entrepreneur bro in your crew gets blown up on a few ventures and now he’s “the guy who’s always got a business idea🙄 .”

At a certain point, the reputation takes on a life of its own.

People stop evaluating the current version of the person and instead react to a story they wrote years ago, because why the hell not?

It’s not like things are ever going to change!

Until they do.

Abruptly.

In fact, this is arguably the greatest time in history for such people.

The Meme'd Shall Inherit the Earth

The distance between obscurity and relevance has never been shorter.

The same person getting rekt in the group chat on Tuesday can wake up on Friday with virality and a growing audience.

Suddenly, new opportunities and an entirely new life trajectory exist.

Permission structures are getting cooked left and right.

I’m certainly not running these Essays through an editorial staff or adhering to any sort of deadline.

We all have something of an instant “Public Access TV” with the phones in our pockets.

Every piece of created content is a form of a modern lottery ticket.

Funnily enough, this benefits the Knicks and Arsenal’s among us the most.

I mean, the DNA is roughly the same:

• Showing up every season.

• One or two notable crashouts.

• Passion and fervor, despite the absence of recent results.

• Tweaking, iterating, trading, often all in the public eye.

The majority of people would see all of those traits and call them embarrassments.

I like to think they’re reps.

Make Jokes At Your Own Risk

The uncomfortable truth about these types is that they're often closer than they appear, to both you personally and success itself.

The punchline and the comeback are often separated by far less than we'd like to admit.

So it’s easy to share the Reel or the TikTok for a quick laugh, a wtf is he/she doing judgement from the proverbial digital high horse.

Just don’t lose sight of the fact life’s new seasons turn over faster than ever.

Quantum leaps in the standings happen quicker and more often than ever before.

The Karl-Anthony Towns’ or the Declan Rice’s in your own world might be easy targets now…but let’s not forget their IRL comps just found out exactly how the polished silver and gold of the league trophy feels against their skin.

Closing Out with the Cup

One of the most interesting things about the ongoing ‘26 World Cup is that the smaller nations are more competitive than ever before.

The availability of training materials, sports medicine information, and tactical know-how via technology has quite literally leveled the playing field in a lot of ways.

Cape Verde, with it’s population of 500K and its 41yo goalie, held Spain to a draw.

Results like that are piling up.

They were previously thought to be impossible.

I think this new phenomenon echoes a lot of what we’re seeing in our lives.

Lower barriers to entry, more accessible tools, greater leverage.

People ask me who I want to win the World Cup.

Sure, USA would be a dream.

If not, CR7 finally getting his with Portugal would be fairytale stuff.

Otherwise?

Give me the smallest, most obscure, tiny population country possible to win it all.

For the spectacle of it.

For the life lessons from it.

And, of course…

For the memes.

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Enjoy the day ♥️

-John Abbate

6.21.2026