Linked lists Memes

That moment when you've been forcing everything into arrays for years and suddenly discover linked lists, trees, and hash maps. The sheer existential horror of realizing how much unnecessary O(n) searching you've been doing. Your entire coding career flashes before your eyes as you contemplate all those nested for-loops that could have been O(1) lookups.

The existential crisis of a linked list data structure is just too real! This poor little node is questioning its purpose in the vast universe of computer science, only to discover its eternal fate: being the go-to whiteboard problem in coding interviews. Despite linked lists rarely appearing in modern production code (hello, ArrayList and Vector), they continue to be the sacred ritual sacrifice that every developer must offer to the tech interview gods. "Reverse this linked list!" the interviewer demands, while both of you silently acknowledge you'll never implement one after getting hired. The robot's existential horror upon learning its purpose is the perfect metaphor for every CS student who spent weeks mastering pointers just to use built-in data structures for the rest of their career.