A self-employed personal trainer by day and meme admin by night (or day, I guess, since time loses all meaning in lockdown), Evans says there is nothing positive for him about having to stay at home. He describes lockdown as a "s**tshow, income-wise".
"I don't even think of it as bittersweet, I just hate it. I work as a personal trainer and I can't earn any money in lockdown," he explains. When the Herald spoke to him, just after the announcement by Jacinda Ardern that the nationwide lockdown would be extended, the popular Instagrammer said he was, unsurprisingly, "less than stoked".
Evans lives on Auckland's North Shore, where new Covid cases have popped up this week. He joined the thousands of Aucklanders who queued up for a test this week, which came back negative, and has been spending lockdown in his bubble with his family, who know his sense of humour quite well and think "it's quite funny" that his memes have taken off the way they did.
How it started
It all started during the first lockdown when Evans began posting Covid-related memes to his personal Instagram page.
"It was pure dumb luck," he says.
Friends found them hilarious and kept asking him where he'd found them, not realising he'd created them himself. Then they started encouraging him to post them on a separate dedicated page. And so, @nzlockdownmemes was born.
"The page has been growing steadily for about a year and a bit anyway," Evans says, but got a definite bump on Tuesday when this lockdown was announced.
Despite the size of its following, Evans says he never wanted to do more than provide people with "some entertainment". "It keeps me busy and I've met a lot of cool people through it," he says.
As for the meme creation process, there's no big secret or plan. Evans simply has a meme idea and runs with it.
On a recent Q+A session on his Instagram Stories, he explained he mostly makes his memes using Meta Meme or just Instagram Stories, for memes like the starter packs.
"As soon as I think of a meme, I make it and post it," he says, explaining that he doesn't let it consume more time than it should.
Since the current lockdown began, he's been posting multiple times a day. Sometimes he comes up with the topic for the meme first, others he thinks of a meme he'd like to use and then comes up with a topic. His current personal favourite is his Bar 101 meme which, much like all his others, was widely shared by Kiwis on Instagram.
How it's going
About 99.9 per cent of the feedback Evans gets these days is positive but he says that hasn't always been the case.
"I used to get a lot more hate initially but not so much now," he says, adding that it was all about figuring out "where the line is".
He gets numerous messages from people praising him for his humour and telling him he is "keeping them sane".
"I get heaps of DMs, especially at the moment, I can barely keep up. People are really nice about it," he says.
With more than 77,000 followers, there are companies now approaching Evans wanting to collaborate with advertising opportunities. He says he is open to those, but will be selective about it and only work with those that align with his values.
As for the memes, they'll keep on coming. While he says he doesn't feel the pressure to keep churning them out, he certainly knows that, especially with lockdown, there is an expectation from his growing audience.
Luckily for those who follow him hoping to get a reprieve from the gloomy headlines, Evans is not short of ideas - but he is definitely looking forward to going back to his non-Covid, Kiwi-centric memes, if it means lockdown is over and he can carry on with his day job too.
