Guess I'll Die
Part of a series on Stock Photography. [View Related Entries]
About
Guess I'll Die refers to a stock photo of a man in a red sweatshirt shrugging his shoulders. The image grew into a reaction image used in situations where the poster jokingly resigns themselves to death due to a minor inconvenience.
Origin
On October 6th, 2009, the photo was uploaded to iStockphoto[1] by Ann Baldwin. It would later be revealed that the photo is of her husband, Mike Baldwin.[2]
Spread
The photo was used as a reaction image as early as April 26th, 2011 in a Fark[3] forum thread on the film Atlas Shrugged. An edit of the image in which the man's face is replaced with a sloth appeared online on the site herbatka.soup.io[4] on January 18th, 2013 (shown below).
In 2013, the image began being used as a reaction image more frequently. It appeared in a Funnyjunk[5] thread on April 20th, 2013, and again in a blog post on markb4.wordpress[6] on the 25th. It found continued use as a reaction image expressing confusion in the following years. A template for "shrugging old man" was added to Meme Generator on May 22nd, 2015.[8] In September of 2015, it began going viral on Tumblr. A post by user noxyouraveragefangirl, now cinnamon-swan,[7] paired it with a text post that gained over 207,000 notes (reblog shown below).
In early 2016, the image began being paired with the text "Guess I'll Die." On January 6th of that year, Facebook user Adam Davis posted the image with the text "Guess I'll Die" along with the caption "When you're too poor to afford affordable health care" to the Facebook page "Useless, Unsuccessful, and/or Unpopular Memes."[9] The post went viral, gaining over 29,000 shares and 9,300 likes and reactions (shown below).
Following that post, several other popular posts appeared online with the "Guess I'll Die" variation of the image. On April 11th, 2016, Tumblr user funkybug[10] posted the image alone, gaining over 139,000 notes. This started the post's popularization on Tumblr where it was used both as a reaction image in popular posts and as an exploitable. Examples of the latter include a post by lesmiserablesbians[11] posted February 16th, 2017 that referenced Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, gaining over 13,000 notes (shown below, left), and a post by imgayjokes[12] from April 12th, 2017 that changed the text to "guess i'm gay," gaining over 14,000 notes (shown below, right).
On July 31st, 2017, Reddit user bloodylipservice posted a screenshot to /r/memes[2] of Baldwin posting a photo of himself to Facebook wearing a shirt based off his meme that his children got for his birthday. bloodylipservice's post gained 450 points (shown below).
Mike Baldwin's Reaction
On August 9th 2017, Gizmodo[13] wrote an article about how Mike Baldwin experienced becoming a meme, confirming that he doesn't really care for, nor get meme culture, and holds nothing against those making unlicensed materials from their work.
Various Examples
Search Interest
External References
[1] iStockphoto – Senior man shrugging shoulders – Stock image
[3] FARK.com – 'Atlas Shrugged' on pace to be the highest-grossing film of the year, The year 1920
[4] herbatka (via Wayback Machine) – What Can You Do?
[6] markb4.wordpress – What Happened To My Animation History Class?
[7] Tumblr (via Wayback Machine) – cinnamon-swan
[8] Memegenerator – shrugging old man
[9] Facebook – Useless, Unsuccessful, and/or Unpopular Memes
[11] Tumblr – lesmiserablesbians
[12] Tumblr – imgayjokes
[13] Gizmodo – How Medical Woes Turned a Retired Professor Into the Face of Fatalism Online
