The first known posting of the NPC Wojak badge with the text "I Support The Current Thing" appeared on Twitter on March 1, 2022, posted by user @empty_banks4. The tweet picked up roughly 6,000 likes over its first two weeks1. The timing was not accidental. Russia had invaded Ukraine just days earlier on February 24, and Twitter users were rapidly adding Ukrainian flag emojis to their display names and bios in a wave of digital solidarity.

On the same day, Twitter user @ThomasEWoods reposted the image and saw much wider reach, pulling in approximately 22,500 likes in 13 days4. Also on March 1, the Instagram account @fakenewsnetwork adapted the concept using the crowd-of-NPCs Wojak template, showing a mass of identical grey faces all parroting the same message, which earned around 3,700 likes4.

Another March 1 variant came from Twitter user @RogueScholarPr, who created an exploited version of the badge that inserted specific signifiers: the Ukrainian flag, LGBTQ+ pride flags including transgender and bisexual flags, and other progressive cause symbols4. This version, which made the political targeting more explicit, picked up about 3,000 likes. The same day, @alBTCorn flipped the format with a version reading "I Oppose The Current Thing," though it gained far less traction4.

The "Current Thing" meme landed at the intersection of several long-running internet debates about performative activism and online virtue signaling. As a concept, it built directly on the NPC meme that had gained mainstream attention during the 2018 U.S. midterm elections, when The New York Times called the NPC Wojak a "collective mascot for the far-right commenters online"5. The "Current Thing" iteration updated the NPC critique for the social media era of profile-picture activism.

Writing for the Deseret News, one commentator argued that the meme only told half the story3. While Musk intended to call out progressive cause-hopping, the article pointed out that secular fervor driving people from cause to cause was just as present on the political right. The piece cited research showing that Donald Trump performed best among non-churchgoing voters during the 2016 primaries, winning "nearly two-thirds of people who don't go to church at all," suggesting that the impulse to latch onto movements filled a vacuum left by declining religious participation3.

The Deseret News analysis connected the meme to broader research on political polarization. A Pew report from the same period found that "among Democrats, 63% see Republicans as immoral, up from just 35% who said so in 2016," while "72% of Republicans see Democrats as immoral, up from 47% seven years ago"3. The "Current Thing" meme, in this reading, was less about any single cause and more about the way politics had replaced religion and community organizations as Americans' primary source of identity and belonging.

The phrase entered common usage in political commentary through 2022 and into 2023, used across podcasts, opinion columns, and social media discussions whenever a new cause dominated the news cycle. Critics of the meme argued it was a thought-terminating cliché that allowed people to dismiss legitimate activism by lumping all causes together as equally shallow3.