Wandering Penguin becomes 2026's sensation

The Internet goes viral with the Penguin meme. The new year kicked off with a peculiar clip of a penguin walking towards a mountain range and becoming distant from its own colony. The video goes viral on social media and becomes a trending meme of 2026.

Over the past week, the penguin’s sombre march has found new life as a meme trend on TikTok as the clip was paired with the pipe organ rendition of “L’Amour Toujours,” creating a dramatic pairing of the solemn music and the animal’s descent into oblivion.

How did the Nihilist Penguin gain attention?

The earliest known TikTok example from the 2026 wave is an edit posted on January 16th by TikToker nature_gamler. The video received more than 192,200 likes and 910 comments within six days, notably combining the two elements that would define the trend: Werner Herzog’s narration and the organ cover of “L’Amour Toujours”. From there, the meme spread quickly throughout mid-to-late January 2026 as other creators began producing their own variations.

On January 20th, Instagram user “4lexfilm” uploaded an edit combining the penguin clip with footage of themselves travelling, a variation that received over 84,600 likes in two days.

That same day, the Facebook page History Cool Kids shared a still from the documentary paired with a quote attributed to Herzog’s narration, drawing hundreds of likes, comments and shares in a couple of days.

Origin of the ‘Nihilist Penguin’ meme?

Initially, known as the Nihilist Penguin meme, it is also called Lonely Penguin or  Wandering Penguin. The viral video originated from famous German filmmaker Werner Herzog’s 2007 documentary about Antarctica, which has been circulating for two decades, but recently it gained media traction and solidified into a full-on meme.

In the film, a penguin is shown wandering alone, disoriented, separated from its colony and continues walking towards the Antarctic mountain ranges, located at a distance.

According to Herzog, this resembled an ominous trek framed as a one-way path to certain death.

The footage of a solitary Adélie penguin walking away from its colony and the ocean toward the distant Antarctic mountains originates from Encounters at the End of the World, a nature documentary directed by German filmmaker Werner Herzog, which was released way back on September 1st, 2007.

The moment appeared roughly an hour and 13 minutes into the film, during a segment in which Herzog reflected on what he described as “penguin insanity.”

In the scene, he questions an ecologist accompanying him about whether penguins can experience something resembling mental instability, before the documentary cuts to a penguin that refuses to enter the water with the rest of its group. Instead, it turns away from the coast and begins moving inland, which Herzog frames as a fatal journey, estimating a roughly 5,000-kilometre or 3,107-mile march into the continent’s interior.

One of the earliest known uploads to label the scene as the “Deranged Penguin” appeared all the way back in November 2008, when YouTube user krisandmaxi posted the clip, helping establish the nickname. In the following years, the clip then appeared sporadically across Reddit, including posts to subreddits such as Frisson.

By the mid-2010s, the clip had become more widely recognised under its “nihilist” framing. In late August 2015, YouTube user Seppe uploaded the footage under the title “Nihilist Penguin,” a version that proved especially viral and went on to receive nearly 2 million views since.

The following year, Redditor joetravers posted the clip to the /r/natureismetal subreddit with a caption once again emphasising its grim tone, describing it as a penguin that “abandons reason and marches towards oblivion,” further reinforcing the meme’s reputation as a darkly poetic wildlife moment.

The clips from Encounters at the End of the World had already made their way onto TikTok by late 2024, but the “Lonely Penguin” footage did not develop into a full-fledged meme until mid-January 2026.