Why everyone on social media is ‘monitoring the situation’

Who’s monitoring the situation right now?

As headlines continue to be dominated by news of missile attacks, retaliations, and calls for ceasefire, there are no shortage of situations to monitor. And X users are responding to the call to arms.

“Me monitoring the situation with the boys,” one X post reads. “I bet he’s texting other women,” reads another. “She doesn’t know I’m monitoring the situation.” A third wrote: “‘I never see you at the club.’ I never see you monitoring the situation.”

The meme speaks to the compulsion to continually refresh social media during times of political turmoil—pulling down at the top of the scroll for the next update. It’s not doomscrolling; it’s monitoring the situation.

This isn’t the first time the meme has surfaced on social media. “The idea of ‘monitoring the situation’ has been used in memes throughout the 2010s, making it hard to pin down exactly when the first known meme to use the phrase was uploaded online,” Phillip Hamilton wrote on the website Know Your Meme.

Now, it’s experiencing a resurgence on X following Israel’s military strikes against Iran, which were followed by U.S. strikes and, most recently, Iran’s missile attack on a U.S. base in Qatar. In the aftermath, Google searches for “is the US going to war” spiked nearly 5,000%, while “World War III” searches surged almost 2,000%, according to Google Trends.

Reddit threads like “Is WW3 slowly happening?” and “Do you think World War 3 is a real possibility?” have been flooded with anxious users. Over on TikTok, users took a predictably unserious approach to the collective anxiety over global events. “First war, what’s the dress code,” one post reads over footage of missiles flying overhead. “When I get drafted into WW3 but they let me bring my AirPods,” another viral post reads, soundtracked to Taylor Swift.

While the fears felt by people around the world as the situation continues to unfold are genuine and warranted—as those who grew up witnessing U.S. invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan can attest—using memes as a coping mechanism is nothing new.

As one X user put it: “Men will literally monitor the situation instead of going to therapy.”