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In contemporary society, examining survival pressures means looking at the socioeconomic system people are embedded in. Memes that make their host unemployable have smaller potential long-term populations, and contravening the social mores and norms endangers the host's survivability, therefore reducing the meme's communicational effectiveness²².

It is detrimental to memetic survival to promote behavior that destroys the host's ability to maneuver in a social space. If survival for a meme is persistence in memory and replication across nodes, then we can look to the nodes and communication systems between nodes for more information about how memes function. As long as a person holds a meme in their memory, it is in the meme's interest that the person continues existing in a healthy-enough way to continue retransmitting the meme to other hosts. Memetic survival, then, is dependent on the physical survival pressures on the meme's host organism, the body politic that engenders the memetic replication.