What Gives People Feelings of Power

Origin

The template comes from a single-panel webcomic titled ‘what gives people feelings of power,’ published on Instagram by the account @iamnotanartist_ on March 20, 2019. The comic is drawn as a plain horizontal bar graph: short bars for ‘money’ and ‘status,’ and a much longer bar for the wholesome, oddly specific answer ‘a cat choosing to cuddle you over anyone else in the room.’ The clean layout, the deadpan title, and the sincere punchline made it instantly exploitable, and the post drew more than 5,000 likes within its first year.

What it means and how it is used

In the exploitable, the tallest bar — the biggest supposed source of power — is swapped for a joke answer. Edits crown something small, petty, hyper-specific, or relatable as a greater ego boost than wealth or social standing: winning a pointless argument, a stranger laughing at your joke, remembering a password on the first try, a pet picking you. The humor comes from that inversion, where a trivial personal victory literally towers over ‘money’ and ‘status’ on the chart. It became a favorite way to name the tiny, disproportionate satisfactions people rarely admit to.

How it spread

After the March 2019 Instagram post, the blank bar-graph template migrated to Reddit, Twitter, and Tumblr, where the empty tall bar invited endless captions. Meme generators and template sites such as Imgflip and Kapwing added fill-in-the-blank versions, cementing it as a reusable format rather than a one-off comic. Its popularity came in waves through 2019 and beyond, and it settled into the broader family of ‘bar graph’ and ‘chart’ meme templates that let people rank the absurd against the serious. On the chart, the horizontal axis is loosely read as how much ‘power’ each item confers, so the joke lands purely through bar length: the punchline answer does not need to be explained, only drawn longer than everything else. That wordless, visual setup is a big reason the template travels so easily across languages and communities. Many variants stack extra bars or extend the punchline bar comically off the edge of the frame, exactly as the blank exploitable does.

Notable examples and variations

• The original wholesome answer: ‘a cat choosing to cuddle you over anyone else in the room.’
• Edits crowning petty wins — winning an online argument, correcting someone, a perfect parallel park.
• Hyper-relatable versions about small daily satisfactions outranking money and status.
• Blank templates used to set up in-jokes within specific fandoms and communities.

Legacy

The format endured because it is both flexible and self-aware: it lets anyone confess an oddly specific ego trip while gently mocking the idea that power comes from money or status at all. It remains a go-to template whenever someone wants to celebrate a small, disproportionately satisfying win.