Hide the Pain Harold: The Stock Model Who Took the Joke Back

The face is familiar even if the name is not. An older man with white hair, smiling with his mouth while his eyes hold something else entirely. He appears in stock photography holding a coffee, using a laptop, standing near a whiteboard, always with the same expression, which the internet correctly identified as a man in some private discomfort performing contentment for a camera.

He is András Arató. He is a Hungarian electrical engineer, he was never supposed to be a model at all, and the pictures that made him famous were taken in the course of two ordinary days of work that he expected to forget about within a week.

How He Ended Up in the Library

Arató has told the story many times. He posted holiday photographs online, a photographer noticed them, asked to do a shoot, and he agreed. He was paid a normal fee for a couple of days of standing in arranged office scenarios holding props, the images went into stock libraries in the ordinary way, and he thought no more about any of it.

Some time later he discovered his own face circulating with captions about hidden suffering, under a name that was not his, understood by millions of people as the universal symbol of pretending everything is fine.

The First Reaction Was Not Delight

This is the honest part of the story and the reason it is worth telling. Arató’s initial response was to try to get the images taken down. He was a working professional, the pictures were being used in ways he had no say in, and the joke was specifically about him being miserable.

He has said openly that he found it upsetting at first and that fighting it was hopeless. Once an image is in a stock library and in the hands of the internet, there is no mechanism on earth that will pull it back.

Then He Changed Strategy

What he did next is why he is in this list rather than in a footnote about the ethics of stock photography. He decided that if he could not stop it, he would participate in it. He started appearing in videos playing the character, gave a TEDx talk about the whole experience, and took advertising work in which he appears as himself performing the joke about himself, knowingly, for money. He turns up at conferences and gaming events to genuine cheers.

He is, at this point, a professional internet celebrity in his seventies who reached that position by having his likeness taken from him and deciding to go and get it back.

Why the Face Works

Worth analysing, because the appeal is specific. Stock photography demands a smile. A smile held on command through a long shoot separates from the eyes, and most stock models are either young enough or trained enough to hide the gap between the two. Arató was neither, and his face therefore recorded the actual experience of being photographed pretending to enjoy an office.

Everybody who has sat through a work photograph recognises it immediately. The meme is not really about him. It is about the ten thousand small performances of contentment that adult life requires, and his face happened to be the one that documented it.

The Better Ending

Compare this to the fate of most involuntary meme subjects, who spend a decade being recognised in supermarkets by strangers laughing at a version of them they never agreed to. Arató got a second career, an audience that likes him, and a measure of control.

He also gets to be, in interviews, a rather thoughtful person on the subject of consent and image rights, which nobody expected from the coffee man.

Our advice, unchanged since 2015: read the model release. And if you end up in a meme anyway, Harold has shown you the exit.