Last year, two things happened to Nick, 30, that meant, for the first time since moving to London, he didn’t need to live in a flatshare. He got a girlfriend, which meant he could halve costs, and his mum unexpectedly passed away, leaving him a small sum of money.
‘I’ve been burning through savings,’ he tells me, ‘and it’s been worth it.’ But now he no longer has to put up with the habits of five strangers. No more arguing with a flatmate who blared out Drexciya sets. No more competing for early-morning bathroom use with the yogi parents of another who, invited to stay for months on end, preferred to meditate in the loo. He laughs now, but the stress of the situation, alongside working a 50-hour week, once led him to be signed off sick.
When I spoke to Nick, he was unaware of his memetic doppelganger.
Popularised on Twitter, the ‘Nick, 30 ans’ meme emerged during France’s 2020 anti-tax movement. A symbol of a disaffected middle class too well-off to receive welfare but squeezed by rising taxes, it paints a grim picture of a broken social contract.
In the meme’s British iteration, Nick is understood to be a Russell Group graduate who moved to London. Arrows symbolise the flow of cash from Nick to two pensioners – Simon and Linda. He foots the bill for their holidays abroad via the extortionate rent he pays them, their triple-locked state pension an added bonus. More controversially, Nick’s taxes are shown to subsidise foreign aid and support a racialised, young, male, welfare recipient, dubbed Karim.
This not-so-young, hard-working Nick is suggested to be a slave to a welfare system that he is unsure will exist by the time he is Simon and Linda’s age.
By 2025, ‘Nick, 30’ had entered the British mainstream as an archetype. His name and plight have been mentioned in Parliament, and there’s a dedicated ‘Nick, 30 ans’ simulator online. When I play, I lose all my housing savings when my landlord increases my rent by £400.
The meme originates from the far right and represents the simplistic view that countless young Brits are doomed because we allow migrants to scrounge off benefits and insist on shelling out foreign aid – its entry into the public consciousness is dangerous. Nevertheless, it reflects a clear sentiment that something has fundamentally gone wrong.
