This article explores the “Lying Flat Movement”, a burgeoning online socio-cultural trend that is in its process of historization as a memetic engagement in Chinese cyberspace. This movement challenges the glorification of relentless societal competition in China, symbolized by the pervasive “Eating Bitterness” (吃苦) and “Spirit of Hard Work” (艰苦奋斗精神) ideologies. We aim to decipher the online discourse surrounding this movement, focusing on its semiotic and modal potentials in (re)shaping collective memory. Our theoretical framework draws from concepts like re-semiotization, media modality, and mediated social action. We gathered 11,555 comments from prominent Chinese social media platforms, such as Sina Weibo and Toutiao, representing the movement’s discourse with meaningful symbols and internet memes. Employing mediated discourse analysis (MDA), we examine these comments to uncover their semiotic, modal, and discursive implications in shaping collective memory. Our findings highlight three key concepts: (1) memetic engagement as a multimodal framework to aid memory concretization, (2) memetic engagement as an ideological cluster interlinking opinions and memetic intertextualities to enrich memory construction and narrative coherence, and (3) memetic engagement as an entangled social action with discourse in place, interaction order, and historical body.