On February 24, President Donald Trump delivered the first State of the Union speech of his second term. I came home from work that evening to my partner flipping between major broadcast streams, eagerly deciding which one he was going to watch.
He finally queued one up, sat on our couch and positioned both his work and personal laptops in front of him on our coffee table. Granted, he is a journalist who covers commodities and had to work, but there was something more to this anticipation. He had split screens going on each laptop: one had live oil and equity prices and a blank page ready to go in case he needed to quickly type up a story, and the other had live commentary running from two different media publications. He kind of looked like this.
While he was tuned into so many screens like the picture above, guests attending the speech began walking into the House of Representatives Chamber. Then his commentary started: “Did you know Democrats are having their own State of the Union that [Virginia Governor] Abigail Spanberger is speaking at?” or “Wow, only four Supreme Court justices are attending?”
I had an epiphany: While I was sitting down to watch it with him, I realized that his level of locked-in is the same intensity that I experience while watching reality TV. This was, really, his own peak form of reality TV. And it’s tweets like the one above that made me realize that it isn’t just my own boyfriend. Many online are admittedly obsessed with simply “monitoring the situation.”
The meme behind “monitoring the situation” is nothing actually all that new. According to Know Your Meme, the phrase has been used online throughout the 2010s, and it doesn’t mean anything all that fancy: It’s all about staying informed on updating breaking news situations and all their later potential developments.
It became popular again in 2025 with heightened political news, like the Blue Origin rocket launch in January, increasing Israel-Iran tensions and Israel’s Operation Rising Lion strikes in Iran in June.
This post describes the image of Jeff Bezos “monitoring the situation” during the launch as a “cultural phenomenon” — “fit, rich, smart, confident, intelligent and in control — the epitome of male aspiration,” the post says. To some degree, it’s certainly true: There’s some seemingly masculine-leaning allure surrounding monitoring the situation.
As history repeats itself with more heightened tensions and what is now an all-out war between the U.S. and Israel against Iran, the memes — and a gripping masculine urge — are back and stronger than before.
“Men all over the world are ‘monitoring the situation’ because geopolitics is the olympics of masculine aggression,” this post says. “There is no bigger sporting event for this category.”
“How it feels when you get home from work and can start monitoring the situation again,” another post reads, with an attached clip from Iron Man 2 of Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) turning on his workshop. A bunch of holographic monitors turn on, illuminating the entire room with a simple clap of Downey’s hands.
Crypto app Phantom even chimed in, with a post saying “he’s not unemployed he’s monitoring the situation,” poking fun at a woman defending her partner for being preoccupied with rigorous monitoring.
“Gonna be home late tonight babe, I’m out monitoring the situation with a couple of guys. We might even stay and monitor a second situation if something comes up,” this post says, along with an attached picture of a group of men sitting at a high-top table in a bar watching numerous screens broadcasting different charts. It’s always nice to see men come together over a hobby.
This all, to some degree, feels like a fancier word for “doomscrolling,” constantly scrolling and consuming negative information on social media, bringing on impending feelings of doom. Aren’t we all always just forced to monitor all the situations because we can’t escape them on social media? These aren’t even memes about news headlines themselves — they’re memes about looking at the news, after all.
Staying informed is certainly important, but this meme isn’t a question of that. News headlines are written so quickly that they’re force-fed to us through feeds at a pace that’s hard to ignore. And at any moment, news can break and change, and we always have direct access to find out immediately what the latest update is. It’s the same magnetic feeling that watching anything live with high stakes, like a sporting event or reality TV, gives us. In this case, it doesn’t even require streaming to keep up with it, making it even more accessible — except “monitoring the situation” has real-life consequences, which are certainly not worth forgetting about either.
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