About

I'm This Old refers to a social game in which participants share images of pop culture artifacts to express their age.

Origin

The earliest available example of the game was posted by Instagram ^[1] user @I_dot_green on March 28th, 2014. That day, they posted an image of an 80s-era Apple Macintosh computer with the caption "#howoldareyou #imthisold #thegreentexthurtmyeyes" (shown below).

Spread

Several years later, on May 5th, 2019, Twitter ^[2] user @chasedinero317 tweeted a photograph of a Minute Maid juice bar and a frozen Ellio's Pizza. They captioned the photograph "Im This Old 😬" (shown below, left).

Days later, Twitter^[3] user @wltgsB tweeted the caption with a photoshopped Game Boy game adaptation of American rapper Lil B's mixtape Blue Flame (shown below, center).

On May 18th, 2019, Twitter^[4] user @flowered_one tweeted a photograph of girl's undergarments labeled with the days of the week. They captioned the tweet, "Im this old 😭 😭I used to get so upset if I couldn’t find the right day." The tweet received more than 11,000 retweets and 33,000 likes in three days (shown below, right).

As the posts grew in popularity, variations of the meme also emerged. For example, on May 18th, Twitter^[5] @Unstablee_ tweeted a photograph from the film Small Soliders. They captioned the tweet, "Let me show my age in a tweet, I’m this old." Within three days, the tweet received more than 32,000 retweets and 78,000 likes (shown below).

On May 20th, BuzzFeed ^[6] published a listicle about the memes. That day, Twitter^[7] published a Moments page on the meme.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References