About

How Old Is…? refers to an exploitable image in which a crying man Googles how old a person is. He then Googles the life expectancy of something tangentially related to the person in his first search, usually a pun on their name, which informs him that the person he first Googled is nearing the end of their life expectancy, which makes him cry harder.

Origin

On February 2nd, 2017, Redditor kkkid69420^[1] posted a collage showing a Google search of the life expectancy of Knuckles from Sonic the Hedgehog with the crying black man (shown below). The post reached over 5,400 points (98% upvote ratio) as of December 2020.

Spread

On July 15th, 2018, Redditor WeebsShouldBeBanishe^[2] posted a variation regarding the Platelet characters from the Cells at Work! anime to /r/animemes, gaining over 3,000 points (99% upvote ratio) in less than a week (shown below).

On July 21st, 2018, Redditor PedroPablito^[3] posted the original version to /r/me_irl, using the Google searches "How old is The Rock?", which shows he's 46 years old, and "How long do rocks live?", which shows "45-46 years." The post gained over 11,000 points (95% upvote ratio) on the subreddit in just two days (shown below).

The post was reposted to other areas over the course of the day, helping it gain popularity. It was tweeted by @FreeMemesKids,^[4] gaining over 51,000 retweets and 121,000 likes in two days. It was also posted to /r/dankmemes^[5] where it gained over 6,800 points (95% upvoted) in the same time period. The format became very popular on /r/dankmemes over the following days, as dozens of users uploaded examples. Some popular examples include a meta version referencing the life cycles of memes,^[6] gaining over 10,000 points (shown below, left). A post about rapper Lil Pump^[7] which inverted the joke gained over 22,000 points (shown below, right).

Other popular examples from elsewhere include a Twitter post by @Iam_ChrisB^[8] referencing Eminem that gained over 120 retweets (shown below, left) and a /r/me_irl post^[9] referencing the rapper Pitbull that gained over 2,800 points (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

Unavailable

External References