Three-months ago, Edward Nox (a pseudonym) was a perfectly functional individual with a reasonable work-life balance. He was married, with two children and he had an excellent career as the Executive Director of UpMeme, a non-profit dedicated to spreading uplifting stories online. 

Mr. Nox was at work when the wheels began to come off the bus we call life.

The catalyst was a LinkedIn post titled, innocently enough, “Do you enjoy good work-life balance?”

Strangely, Mr. Nox had never considered the question. He always thought of his work as so important that it needed no balance. People needed uplifting stories, and he was making millions of people’s lives better. Most importantly, his wife understood that, his kids understood that and everything was okay. But the question nagged at Mr. Nox. So, he did what modern folk do, he began to investigate the idea of work-life balance online. 

Mr. Nox has always been a fan of meme-like images and short videos and so he satisfied himself by viewing over 25,000 individual work-life balance blog posts. Strangely, while Mr. Nox would have thought of work-life balance as involving family life, most people posting on the subject rarely seemed to be married and never had kids. So instead of dinner with the kids, he saw people ‘de-stressing’ by camping in trees. He saw people buying vans and apparently just surrounding themselves with new trees every night. He even saw people making nature a part of themselves by literally implanting themselves with tree DNA. It was fascinating. 

Mr. Nox could hardly imagine such a life, but he loved watching others’ seemingly perfectly balanced lives (which seemed to involve no emphasis on work). Soon, it was too late, Mr. Nox was completely addicted to work-life balance posts. His family left him and his non-profit fired him. Still, he was glued to that glowing screen watching people find new ways to make trees an integral part of their lives.

Eventually, a fellow denizen of the alley behind 4th Street recommended he go to MAA, Meme Addicts Anonymous. For his entire professional career, Mr. Nox had thought of MAA as the enemy of all that was good and light. Now, he needed their help. When he finally made the call, MAA put him on a strict diet of books and long-format articles. They helped him rediscover the beauty and complexity that can never be captured in a meme or a short video. With time, it is hoped that Mr. Nox will reconnect with his family. However, as with many recovered addicts, MAA recommends that he not return to his prior – meme-filled – career.

Mr. Nox asked us at F$JNews to sharing this story in order to help people understand when memes have cross from being something they enjoy to becoming something that enjoys them. Also, Meme Addicts Anonymous paid us to raise awareness of their cause.