About

I Had to Grind For This View refers to a series of images which grew popular in March of 2017 that show a person looking out over an expanse that has been photoshopped to be a landscape from a video game. The joke parodies social media posts where a person brags about how they had to work hard, or "grind," to achieve success by using "grind" in the video game sense of the term,^[1] meaning to achieve goals and boost stats by performing mundane tasks.

Origin

"I had to grind for this" is a popular phrase in social media posts in which a person is bragging about how their hard work led to their ability to lead a more expensive lifestyle (examples shown below).

On November 6th, 2016, Twitter user @RedAvea^[2] parodied such posts by pairing the caption "I had to grind for this view" with two screenshots from a video game. Her tweet gained 8 retweets and 63 likes.

On March 17th, 2017, Instagram user mrgiveyogirlback^[3] paired the caption with an image of a boy looking out over a landscape from Minecraft. This post, shown below, gained over 20,000 likes and inspired the spread of the meme.

Spread

The same day, mrgiveyogirlback's post began appearing in copies on other social media feeds. On Twitter, user @FreeMemesKids^[4] posted a version without credit and gained over 7,200 retweets. Instagram user Vicodins^[5] reposted it in a post that gained over 48,000 likes. On the 18th, Redditor king_caleb177 posted the image to /r/dankmemes^[6] where it gained over 20,000 points. The post began inspiring variations referencing various other memes, historical events, and pop culture references.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References