About

Man Loses Last Bit Of Hope, also known as Last Additional Bit Of Hope, or in full as Man Who Thought He'd Lost All Hope Loses Last Additional Bit Of Hope He Didn't Even Know He Still Had is the headline for a satirical news article published by The Onion in 2000. It has been widely used as an exploitable catchphrase for images of people who are sad, depressed, or otherwise clearly hopeless.

Origin

The Onion^[1] published the article on August 2nd, 2000. The article describes a 31-year-old man from Indianapolis named Bob Dempsey being surprised to find he had some hope to lose:

Prior to Monday, Dempsey had not experienced any loss of hope in more than three years. According to Wasserbaum, a majority of Dempsey's hope-losses hit him in successive ramrod batterings between the ages of 18 and 24. By the time he had reached his late 20s, Dempsey had lost enough of his remaining hope to be considered officially hopeless. Nevertheless, he forged ahead with his few tiny remaining shreds of hope–too insignificant to be considered hope to the average person–until a final devastating blow depleted his hope reserves in February 1997.

Spread

The earliest recorded use of the headline as a caption for an image was on November 27, 2015, when Tumblr user smugglypuff^[2] replaced the original image with Kazuhira Miller from Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. As of 2021, the post (below) has received over 3,400 notes.

On October 26, 2020, a "Genshin Impact": meme account on Instagram^[3] posted an image of a new powerful weapon captioned with the headline. The image (below) received over 12,000 likes in less than a year.

On November 1st, 2020, YouTuber Jimmy Broadbent tweeted^[4] an image of Formula 1 auto racer Valtteri Bottas captioned by the headline. The tweet (below) receieved over 1,800 likes in 10 months.

Various Examples

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External References