#ThingsToSay is a late-summer-2026 TikTok and Instagram Reels format in which creators pair a serious-looking headshot with a bulleted list of intentionally terrible one-liners for a specific social situation — a job interview, meeting a partner’s father, post-sex banter — delivered in the straight-faced cadence of a self-help explainer. The format exploded in August and September 2026 and sits alongside a parallel wave of ironic hustle-culture memes.
Quick Facts
- First seen: August 17, 2026 on TikTok
- Origin post: @cawkringinvestor’s “Things to say after cracking” (1.7M+ views in its first month)
- Format: Headshot or film still + bulleted list of intentionally bad lines
- Status: Active, one of late summer 2026’s dominant joke templates
Origin
TikTok user @cawkringinvestor posted the first widely shared entry on August 17, 2026, titled “Things to say after cracking” and framed as post-sex banter suggestions. The video collected over 1.7 million views in the following month, and by late August the layout — a headshot or film still above a bulleted list of straight-faced bad advice — had been copied into every social setting creators could think of. By mid-September Meme Encyclopedia had an entry for the format and KnowYourMeme’s editorial team covered the broader hustle-culture-meme wave it belongs to.
How It Works
- Pick a scenario. A job interview, meeting the in-laws, a first date, firing an employee, declining an invitation.
- Pick a serious reference image. Usually a stock headshot, a movie still (Patrick Bateman, Succession’s Kendall Roy) or a straight-faced celebrity portrait.
- Write 4–8 bulleted “things to say.” Each one should sound like plausible advice at first glance and then clearly collapse — too intense, too oversharing, too corporate, too unhinged.
- Deliver it deadpan. The straight presentation is the joke; actual advice would ruin it.
Notable Variations
- “Things to say after cracking” — @cawkringinvestor’s original.
- “Things to say in a job interview” — the single most-copied scenario.
- “Things to say to your girlfriend’s dad” — the household-encounter variant.
- “Things to say when you get fired” — the corporate-exit variant.
- Celebrity-headshot stacks — the same list paired with a different serious portrait, which flattens into a meme-of-memes format.
Peak Virality
The format climbed through late August 2026 and became one of September’s dominant TikTok and Reels templates. It belongs to a wider 2026 cycle of “ironic self-help” memes also covered by KnowYourMeme — “Invest in Rare Fish, Multiple Uncles,” “Mongolian Fishing Boots, Tech Extremists & Zara Employees” — which share the same move: borrow the visual grammar of a sincere hustle-culture video and plug in jokes.
Cultural Impact
The template reads as both a parody of the self-help clip genre and a vehicle for the kind of oversharing jokes that would feel too mean as a standalone post. Delivered as “things to say,” they feel like safe hypotheticals — the creator isn’t saying it, they are only listing it — which lets riskier punchlines ride into mainstream feeds. The format’s remixability (one variable: the scenario) has also made it durable: unlike dance trends tied to a single sound, each #ThingsToSay post refreshes its own context.
Variations & Related Tags
- Sibling tags: #ThingsToSayMeme, #ThingsToSayAfter
- Adjacent formats: #HustleCultureMeme, #IronicAdvice
- Companion wave: KnowYourMeme’s “Invest in Rare Fish” and “Mongolian Fishing Boots” entries
Sources
- https://meme.com/memes/things-to-say
- https://trending.knowyourmeme.com/editorials/guides/what-is-the-things-to-say-meme-the-viral-hustle-culture-memes-on-tiktok-and-reels-explained
- https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/invest-in-rare-fish-multiple-uncles
- https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/mongolian-fishing-boots-tech-extremists-zara-employees