The 2010s: The Rise and Rise of the Sad Man

Back in the real one, circa 2010, the original Sad Keanu Reddit thread soon doubled as a repository for stories of the actor doing acts of good, big and small, by people who claimed to have some connection to him. The stories aren’t verified, but they don’t read as apocrypha either. Reeves is a good guy. It’s sad that he’s allegedly sad. The meme worked like an unsolicited Kickstarter: A Time story under the rubric “That Viral Thing” recounted stories of people who seemed genuinely ready to donate money in the name of Reeves’s happiness. The author interviewed the man who started the Facebook group called Cheer Up Keanu with tens of thousands of members. It was all very sweet. (Regardless of whether his inner life matched the image, it continued to be easy to cheer for Keanu, even as his success multiplied through the rest of the decade; whatever leg up he got on the rest of the world, it always felt earned because it was framed within this perceived sadness).

The phenomenon doesn’t always work so well. Take Ben Affleck, who pushed the genre forward into new and thrilling territory beginning in 2016, a very hard year for him and for so, so many of us. He is sad in a car. He is sad on a beach. He is sad smoking a cigarette. He is sad vaping. He could be found “smoking through the pain of existence,” according to the Cut. He is sad in a junket video even. Somebody superimposed “The Sound of Silence” over the footage, zooming in on his face as his thoughts appear to turn inward. It’s devastating. (Actually, he’s fine, he tweeted after the New Yorker’s Naomi Fry collected the internet flotsam around Sad Affleck together in a 2018 essay. “Thick skin bolstered by garish tattoos,” he wrote.)

Unlike Reeves, Affleck seems to be the artist of his own pain. He and Jennifer Garner, the mother of their three kids, divorced, and then he made some ill-advised dating choices, including, at one point, his children’s nanny. In 2017, at the height of Harvey Weinstein’s defenestration, the actor had to address a past on-camera groping incident. Sometime in the years prior, he got a bad tattoo, the one he referred to in the tweet above. It is not small.

Affleck has spoken openly about his struggle with alcoholism and has been spotted out in the world with his sober coach, which has garnered some heartfelt sympathy. But the Sad Affleck photos never inspired any of it. In them, he is always slightly bedraggled with tired, usually closed eyes, always looking like he’s breathing out stale air that he’s been holding in for a long time. They are an over-the-top caricature of the anxiety that, as the decade winds down, seems to live within all internet-dwellers’ ids. What are we looking for in our hours of scrolling anyway? What misery are we trying to ease?

Over its 10 years of existence, the sad-man meme has gone from sympathy-inducing—a collective, “We’re all in this together!”—to something much harder, something more revoltingly familiar. Affleck’s thousand-yard stare makes one laugh in the same way hitting one’s funny bone does. The recognition is abrupt, and we laugh almost despite ourselves. It’s been a long decade, and every micro-generation gets the sad man it deserves.

There is hope, though. Reeves had a banner year in 2019. A GQ profile featured a riff on whether or not Reeves is lonely, but everyone used the occasion of Reeves holding hands on the red carpet with a human woman to celebrate the end, or at least truncation of, his “sadness.” The end of this decade marks a happy one for the sad man. And so maybe with time and work, there will be a happy ending for us all.

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