This Viral ‘American Mind Cannot Comprehend’ Photo Has Been Viewed Over 80 Million Times

A photo of two young men sitting at a table smoking cigarettes and drinking beer as a young woman stands nearby has exploded on X (formerly Twitter) this week, but why?

The post is captioned: “The American mind cannot comprehend this.” It’s a meme that has been going since at least 2023 and it actually started the other way around with Americans posting “the European mind cannot comprehend this.”

But the recent photo posted on April 25 by the X account “Cigarette Dystopia” has caught people’s imagination and sparked a debate over American lifestyles versus European lifestyles.

The photo was taken on a popular street in the Old Town of Marbella, Spain. The street scene photograph features an attractive young woman wearing a plunging dress smoking a cigarette as two men and another person sit around a table drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. It is a good photo that looks to have been taken on a smartphone.

As Newsweek notes, the photos does a great job of depicting laid-back European cafe culture that countries like Spain are famous for. You will also find such scenes in Greece, Italy, and France. The tradition dates back to the 17th century and often involves the consumption of coffee, alcohol, and cigarettes.

But this depiction of life in Southern Europe along with the provocative “American mind cannot comprehend” caption has triggered some to hit back at the photo’s message, bringing up economic matters in which the United States has a great advantage over Europe. Some estimates put Spain’s economy 12 to 16 times smaller than the U.S.

Some comments online alluded to the fact that these men are lounging around in the middle of the day rather than working but others argue there is more to life than material gain.

With the United States taking an isolationist turn in recent months, imposing tariffs on imports from Europe, it is possible that still photos capturing the essence of either one of the great continents will continue to strike up lively debate online.

Many photographers from Europe have ventured to the United States to capture the country’s essence. Perhaps the most famous is Robert Frank’s The Americans. PetaPixel featured Italian photographer Gabriele Galimberti’s unforgettable Ameriguns series which saw him capture proud gun owners and the American tradition to bear arms.

There are fewer American photographers who are famous for going to Europe to capture European life (although plenty went to cover World War I and World War II.) But that is arguably because Europe has a rich history of documentary photography, especially in the early and mid-20th century — think Henri Cartier-Bresson, Brassai, et al. Also, the United States is credited as the first country that took photography to be a serious art form and built up a strong industry around it, attracting many European photographers and keeping American photographers stateside.

The viral tweet is just the latest in a long history of photographic exchange and discussion between the two continents.