We all need a break from life's tumults every now and again. When the pangs of love, heartbreak, or drama come into our lives unannounced, it can be easy to get ensconced in negative emotions -- getting so absorbed that it can feel impossible to sunder yourself from these harrowing ups and downs. But there's one thing that always, without fail, puts us back on our feet and lifts us up, and that's cat memes. 

Cat memes are more than memes - they're a window into society, the ubiquitousness of humanity's ebb and flow, our pulses of pain, and our euphoric highs of bliss. We're all breathing the same air, seeing the same sky, watching the same sun float up and down in the sky. Cat memes are like that too - we're all enjoying their bliss, their mindless zoomies, their gentle purring when we're petting them.

Life is meant to be played with, not just lived. Whether they're pouncing, prancing, tumbling, or creating chaos that will absolutely need to be cleaned up later, cats have a talent for turning every day into a highlight reel. Science has proven that taking a break to look at playful kitties increases happiness, decreases stress, and boosts your ability to say "awww" at least 47% more sincerely. So settle in, stretch your scrolling thumb, and enjoy the whiskery chaos of 25 meowdorable felines who are absolutely living their best playtime lives.

This job candidate was repeatedly disrespected by his potential employer, as if it were some great honor to be underpaid and overworked.

Of course, it's worth noting that there are plenty of individuals who would be thrilled to receive a salary offer of $65,000 annually. Still, after three decades of experience in a field where this guy should have been offered at least twice that amount, it's safe to say that this was a paltry offer.

Unfortunately, it doesn't exactly end there. This manager was so focused on how great he was that he also managed to reveal his unrealistic expectations for the position, seemingly on purpose. Apparently, employees were expected to work 10 hours a day despite the fact that their salaries contractually reflected an 8 hour work day. That meant that the candidate was expected to work an extra 10 hours each week, unpaid. That's 520 hours a year. 

The most amusing part of it all is that this manager didn't bat an eye as he was delivering this information. His hubris seemed to cloud his judgment as well as any semblance of realistic expectations for employees these days. Keep scrolling below for the full story and to find out how the author responded to this offer in the end.

Cats don't just do comedy - they embody it. They're the floofy philosophers of foolishness, the tiny toe-bean jesters roaming our homes with an air of sophistication… right before falling off a countertop they absolutely meant to fall off. Truly, they are the cultivated cream of the comedic crop: elegant in theory, hilariously unhinged in practice.

Ask any cat parent and they'll confirm that their feline friend is a walking, meowing contradiction. One moment they're perched like a regal meowsterpiece - perfect posture, half-closed eyes, whiskers poised for a Renaissance portrait. The next moment, they're tearing around the living room at mach speed because their own tail "looked suspicious". High art meets chaotic slapstick, and we are merely the witnesses.

There's the dignified loaf who chooses to sit in a box two sizes too small, insisting it's avant-garde interior design. The "intellectual" kitty who studies the mysteries of the universe by blankly staring at a wall for twenty minutes straight. The self-proclaimed comedian cat who bonks their head on the doorframe and looks offended at the door.

This is the essence of cat comedy: intentional or accidental, refined or ridiculous, cats are always serving their funniest selves. And we - devoted feline fanatics - clap at it like the good audience members we are. After all, when the world gets too serious, a little meowing madness is exactly the cultured humor we need.

This 22-year-old future medical student finally earns her dream acceptance letter, only to face an unexpected opponent: her boyfriend. For two years, the relationship seemed supportive enough until an opportunity arrived with a stethoscope. The boyfriend begins to unravel, framing her achievement as abandonment, insisting she defer and reapply locally for his comfort. He argues geography over ambition, feelings over facts, love over logic. She explains the stakes, the lost years, the competitive exams, the volatile admissions, but it's like diagnosing a patient who refuses treatment. He wants her to stay, to wait, to trade her dream for proximity.  

What he calls love is simply fear dressed up in sentimentality. Relationships like this run perfectly fine until one partner evolves, and then growth feels like betrayal to the one still standing still. His insecurity is not subtle, it's a quiet attempt to clip her wings before she takes flight. He imagines control as stability, forgetting that love built on limits is simply dependency with better lighting. Her hesitation doesn't come from doubt in herself, but from the emotional guilt he's spoon-feeding her as affection.  

Sometimes the Cat Distribution System works on "hard mode", delivering a whiskered visitor at the exact moment your life is least prepared for one. New apartment, strict no-pet rules, Chicago winters barreling in, and oh - surprise! A cat has chosen you. But the CDS doesn't deal in convenience. It deals in destiny. It sends the cats who need help to the humans who will actually stop, worry, linger at the door, and ask "Okay… what do I do to keep this little guy safe?" And that instinct alone already tells us the CDS got this match right.

Of course, some people are allergic to cats. Mildly allergic, moderately allergic, "eyes puff up like cartoon balloons" allergic - doesn't matter. The CDS finds them anyway. And somehow, despite sniffles and itchy eyes, these humans fall completely in love. That's exactly what happened here: a couple who can't have a cat, can't breathe around cats, and yet can't ignore the one sweet stray who recognizes their car and cries at their door when the wind gets sharp and cold. Allergies may be strong, but the pull of a cat who has chosen you? Even stronger.

And when life hands you a floofy dilemma like this, the online feline family swoops in like the warmest, coziest superhero team. Advice on building shelters, keeping outdoor cats warm, checking for microchips, feeding safely - plus encouragement, empathy, and "you're doing great" energy. It's truly heartwarming to see cat lovers helping new cat friends help a cat in need. A community of kindness, one pawprint at a time.

It's interesting how, the last time you walk out of the doors of your high school, you expect that somehow all of that pettiness and immaturity that you experienced, the cliqueness and the put-downs, will somehow remain contained within the walls of that school. That as you enter your adult life, you'll meet people who approach situations with fair rationality.

Well, the truth of the matter is that those people leave the walls of that school, too; they don't simply remain within them or evaporate into thin air. They get older, they find jobs—just like you do. And while some of them will experience growth and learn tools for self-reflection, a great many won't and will be perpetually stuck at the same level they were at in high school.

Unfortunately, they have a tendency to drag others down to their level, and sure enough, when you enter certain spaces, you will find yourself faced with those all-too-familiar old feelings of shame and not belonging.

When this employee resisted joining in with the gossiping of her supervisor and another member of her team, she found herself instead the target, with the pair sending very obvious messages to each other and making passive-aggressive comments at her expense. Luckily, the employee was able to get herself moved to another team without things getting too messy, but there are plenty of instances in the workplace where this type of thing would quickly escalate into an issue with HR.

Only three weeks until Catmas, feline fam! We hope your bells are jingling and ring-ting-tingaling, too because it's lovely weather for a sleigh ride together with you. That's all our original words, no, don't look it up or Google it. Remember, not everything you read on the internet is true.

But in all seriousness, we're pawsitively pumped for Santa Paws to come. We know that it's a stressful time - the end of the year, mandatory family time, traveling, buying presents, and kids being on break from school, but we're here to bring those vibes back up and get you in the hissterical holiday spirit. How else can we do that except with some festive "Merry Catmas" memes? 

If there's one thing we love more than Christmas, it's cats. And if you're reading this, you probably feel the same way. Shake off that stress and fill yourself up with pawsitivity from all these cute cats celebrating Catmas in the only way they know how - with pure sass and silliness. They may pretend like they don't like Christmas, but we all know they do. Even if it's just to accomplish their purrsonal mission of taking down the Christmas tree every year. Everyone needs a goal, right?

The holiday spirit is in the room with us, and it's full of cattos. Enjoy these feline funnies and have a meowy Catmas!

More and more people are going low or no contact with their own parents because the parents simply cannot act right, and this MIL is a great example. 

A lot of people these days have been cutting off their parents, and some have posited that it's because we're all too connected. In the past, if your mom annoyed you, you could just let all her calls go to voicemail for a while, and if she showed up knocking at your house, you could pretend that you weren't home until she left. This would give both of you time to cool off and think about how to mend things. But these days, parents talk to their kids constantly through texting and social media, and a lot of them have their children's locations, too. This makes it all but impossible to ignore a parent who's been behaving in an unkind way. And oftentimes, the parent will push their child too far, making them make the painful choice to limit their contact. 

This person's MIL is a great example of the selfishness that some parents bring to the table, as you can read for yourself in the utterly insane pity-party post she wrote for her son's birthday. As one commenter noted, in a birthday post to someone else, she used the words "myself" and "I" more than a dozen times! She wants everyone to know that she's the innocent party here, and her big mean old son is the one who's "hurting" her and her husband. If she actually had respect for her child, she would never write this humiliating message for the world to see. It's crystal clear that she thinks she's 100% in the right — so much so that it's all she can think about, even on her son's birthday. It's telling that she writes about how he requested to go no-contact 6 months ago due to things being said that couldn't be unsaid. But it's as if she hasn't taken a single second to reflect on her own actions, because she refuses to acknowledge that most of these parent-child conflicts are caused by both parties, to some extent. It's really pathetic, and if she ever sees the post and reads the comments, maybe she'll gain a much-needed reality check. In the meantime, though, I hope this person and the husband demand that the MIL take this post down, before blocking her so they don't have to see this kind of drivel ever again. 

We're not going to lie, we've fallen prey to the charms of more than one bodega cat. But, as cute as it is to have a purrsonal friend while shopping for snacks, we can't help but think how they would be so much happier in a loving, safe home. Sure, a bodega where everyone loves them and they get lots of treats is better than nothing, but it can't compare to a pawrent who takes care of their every whim and fancy. Some bodega cats do get their happy endings though, like 'Matzo'!

A florist joined a NY shop where Matzo lived, and the two quickly became inseparable. Matzo wasn't really cared for before she arrived, but she started cleaning her, giving her better food, bought her a bed, etc. Well, the shop is about to be renovated, so this florist decided to finally take Matzo home fur good! Now Matzo is living the comfy, cozy life after living in the bodega for 10 years. Now, she finally has a place to call home. 

Sure, it will be an adjustment for both of them, but we're sure that Matzo will adjust to her new life quickly, once she realizes all the perks it comes with. See more of Matzo and her story below!

It's finally cold outside. Cold and festive. This is one of our favorite periods of the year for the obvious reasons and for the less obvious ones. Like the fact that this is the best time of year to cuddle under blankets with our cats. We're cold, they're cold, and the two best sources of heat in the house are the blankets and the humans, so we become their favorite napping spots. Of course, as fun as it may be to be inside when it's cold, this is also an important time to keep an eye and an ear out, because outside, there are no blankets for lost kittens to hide under.

And the kitten in this story… considering the cold and the injuries that she had, would not have survived the winter out there alone. Heck, we're not sure she would have survived for a couple more days. But she lucked out. The kitten was found by a dog, and this dog, confused and excited, alerted his pawrents, and they gave her the second chance that she deserved. 

Manager gave that whole speech about lack of experience and not being "invested," and ever since then, the dynamic has started to feel a little rigged. The engineer points out issues, offers fixes, does the boring thinking-ahead part of the job. The manager waves it off in the moment, only to circle back later and roll out the same idea with his own name attached once reality proves the engineer right.

When the backup area might be unavailable, the engineer suggests putting a clear procedure in writing. Manager insists it will always be free. Of course the first time they need it, it is not available, and suddenly the concern everyone brushed past becomes a fire to put out. On the construction site, the engineer spends time talking with the company, gets them to agree to clear junk on the condition of a written order. Without a laptop handy, the plan is to send it the next day and keep things moving. After a call, the manager tells them not to send anything. Later, when the workers ask for that written authorization, it comes straight from the manager along with the praise.

Every once in a while, we look at our cats… our spoiled little housecats, resting on our fluffy duvets, their tummies full of snacks, their expression so serene, and we think that thank god they are with us. Because there is not a single chance in heck that they would survive out there on their own. And yet, despite this being true for essentially every housecat, there are still people like the ones in this story - people who abandon their cats. All alone, facing a reality they have never had to face. We could not be angrier at people like that. 

We can only say thank you to the people like the neighbor in this story. The neighbor realized that this cat had been abandoned after their neighbors moved, and when they found the cat terrified and alone under their home, they did the best thing they could have done - coaxing the cat gently and slowly out from under there, bringing the cat home, and giving the poor thing a second chance at life. 

Remember when finding a healthy work-life balance was in vogue?

This employee was reprimanded and accused of not having enough "passion" for his job after he didn't respond to Slack messages that were sent his way at 10:00 PM several hours after his work day finished. For the record, this refusal to answer those messages immediately is not reflective of a lack of passion. Rather, it's a display of self-control and a desire for a proper balance between one's professional and personal life.

There was a time when finding that balance was praised, as it forced managers, coworkers, and colleagues to recognize the need for a healthy amount of space. However, it seems that in the past few years, we have regressed in terms of our overall approach to workplace culture. This manager's insistence that his employee's choice to set up healthy boundaries illustrated some kind of professional negligence is just further proof of that cultural regression.

When the employee, who worked in marketing, came in for his annual review, these boundaries were brought up and framed in a negative light. Keep scrolling below to find out how the employee responded and what options he should weigh moving forward!

Finding a decent landlord can be as rare as finding a needle in a haystack. There's always a catch when it comes to these things. The closer the property is to how you wanted it, the more terrible the landlord will be; that is just how the way things are.

The story below proves just that. A family moved into a cute little house that checked all their boxes, and they thought everything worked out nicely when they signed their lease. Except that as soon as they moved in, things started to fall apart around the house. When they called the landlord to fix these issues, the landlord decided to cut corners and do these repairs in the cheapest way possible, which obviously meant they didn't last long.

When it became clear that the only option the tenants had was to move out, the landlord started demanding they pay to fix everything that was wrong with the house, including structural repairs, which would end up costing the tenants thousands of dollars.

Pay raises in the workplace are what keep employees lower in the corporate hierarchy on track to try and believe they can become something bigger and greater someday (even if that's just the lie they sell us so we keep clocking in every morning). Everybody needs money, especially right now, so companies can really do whatever they want and give us as little money as necessary because, well, that's the way the world works.

However, this employee refuses to accept that. They want that sizable pay raise, and they'll look elsewhere to get it. If you've ever left your workplace for greener pastures, you know that it's equally nerve-wracking and exciting once you figure out that you're worth way more than the small number your ex-company attached to you.

This employee makes a point to internally transfer to another team at their company when their boss tries to tell them the other team cannot give them a pay raise of over 12%, which is allegedly the cap for internal transfer raises. Well, what do you know? A few days later, a nice letter stating the employee's 28% pay increase enters the chat. What was that, boss? Maybe it was just the wind…

This electrical retailer in an English mall had seen plenty of strange customer requests, but none quite like the couple carrying in a giant cracked TV as if returning a loaf of bread. It's the early Wii era, when motion controls met chaos, and safety straps were merely decorative suggestions. The couple storms in, insists their television "just broke," and demands a replacement from a store they never bought it from. Their kid, temporarily abandoned at the counter, casually reveals the truth: the Wii remote slipped mid-bowling game and found its target bullseye in expensive glass.  

While the adults spin a story about spontaneous screen failure, the manager already knows the truth and, adding insult to injury, discovers the TV isn't even their brand. The parents, desperate for someone else to foot the bill for their clumsy offspring's fastball, turn hostile, red-faced and defensive. Then comes the magic phrase from the dad, admitting it was "an accident caused by the Wii," sealing their own comedic defeat. The manager, tired and amused, threatens to call security if they dump the evidence and walk away. 

I can't think of one job candidate who loves the interview process. And, of course, depending on the level of the position and one's personal experiences, some processes can be more tedious than others. But that's just the way it is, because how much can you really learn about someone in a 20-minute interview? In that time, they could crack two perfectly-timed jokes that suggest they're 'perfectly-fit', but does that mean they're the Excel wizard the company's looking for? Not necessarily. Ensuring someone is the perfect fit for your job offer may require a stronger look at the experience, skills, and perhaps seeing how they work with your material…but not every job seeker is going to be too fond of those long-process requirements! 

Especially this employee, who feels at though he should be exempted from this 4-stage interview process due to applying for a senior position. He can wrap his head around the concept for those new to the working world. But in his mind, he has enough experience that doesn't need to be justified by a few at-home assignments or 'culture fit' interviews…So he withdrew his application for the job, applying for one that required a single yes or no interview instead!

We all have that one coworker (and it's not the office manager) who tries to run their workplace like the Navy. No, Stacy, you don't have full rein over the soap choices in the communal bathroom. Hey, Andrew, the office pantry is not the place to take out your at-home frustrations on—the same sentiment applies to your coworkers, too.

Each workplace has someone like this. This specific colleague might not be as abrasive as the colleague in the story below, but they come pretty dang close. Why do folks think they're entitled to treat their coworkers like kindergartners? Then, they come to realize that they're the ones who are actually acting like the children they believe exist around them. It doesn't make any sense… But, then again, in their minds, they don't need to make sense. They just need to scream, and scream loudly.

The narrator in the next story describes their colleague as the "Pantry Queen". This colleague visits the office pantry at least eight times per shift, and she admits that she needs to be in the pantry for at least 15 minutes, too. Well, this pantry-centric colleague loses it when their picture-perfect setting—the pantry, of course—is tainted: Someone forgot to fill the ice cube tray. All heck breaks loose. Scroll to read.