Many people have pondered my fascination with lolcats. The answer is simple: humour using animals as a proxy allows us to delve deeply into the human condition, to reveal our foibles  and frailties.

A good example is the recent post I shared from icanhascheezburger. It highlights the dangers of success for human beings.

We strive and strive to achieve power and status and then often discover that this achievement does not fulfil as we had hoped or planned.

There often remains unnamed, inchoate desire that is unsatisfied by achievement of long held goals.

Or, we achieve the goal and then discover that we’re on a treadmill from which it can be hard to alight. The achievement of success can be a trap, one where satisfaction remains elusive, and yet one cannot seem to stop.

As a person who has achieved a variety of ‘successes’ during my life this lolcat reminded me that success is not always what one imagines.

The lolcat is a charming, cute mechanism for transmitting humourous and important ideas about humanity. They also make me LOL.