The end of spring in 2010 was a quiet time in Keanu Reeves’s career. The Matrix and its sequels were long over. The John Wick trilogy was still a twinkle in some script doctor’s eye. Reeves was working on an independent project that was destined to never really pop for him. At some point that spring, a photographer named Ron Asadorian took a photo of him in a V-neck and blazer sitting on a bench, cheap coffee on the street below him, sandwich in hand, staring at nothing in front of him. His posture wasn’t defeated necessarily, but resigned, as if his entire body was sighing, “Ham and cheese again? Every day it’s fucking ham and cheese.” Splash News, an international photo agency that supplies the internet with the bulk of celebrity paparazzi photos, posted it on its site, ready for a willing tabloid to purchase and publish.

Then in June of that year, a Reddit user named rockon4life45 posted the photo to the site. At the time, when Twitter was still a fledgling media site and Reddit wasn’t quite so feral as it is today, the upvote model provided ever-updating popularity contest results for online content. Most news organizations looked to the front page of Reddit to determine what the internet was talking about any given day. The meme arrived in two parts: Over the first image of Reeves staring at his sandwich is the text, “I really like acting.” And over the second, he’s chewing a bite of the sandwich and it reads, “Because when I act, I’m no longer me.” The meme was upvoted to the front page and a sad-man meme was born.

From there, the meme found life mostly in the form of photoshopping Reeves next to things that could be making him sad, like a slumped panda or 30 to 40 cats. By October, New York magazine’s Vulture told him about his internet legacy. He seemed to take it well. “So they like take paparazzi pictures and recontextualize them? Funny,” Reeves said, adding, “But given the scope and scale of what can happen out there, that sounds like an all right one. It sounds conceptually funny.”

The galaxy of conceptually funny was expandable, essential for any meme, which is what Sad Keanu swiftly inspired. Any man caught looking sad could be a sad man, and any photo of a sad man could be photoshopped into near infinite situations. There was a Weird Al version from an airport (2015), and a Joe Biden version, in which the former vice president stared out the Oval Office windows as Barack Obama met with—get this—the then president of Ukraine (2014). My personal favorite, if one were into awarding superlatives, is when Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan morosely rode Big Thunder Mountain Railroad at Disneyland (2015). He looked so deeply dispirited that not even the magic of Disney, nor the thrill of applied physics, could pull him out of it. (It should be said that Crying Michael Jordan is not a sad-man meme, but in a category unto itself, not just because it precedes the bounds of end-of-decade lists—it surfaced in 2009—but because of the tears. The emotion evoked in the sad-man memes is one withheld. It’s steely and it’s existential, a despondency that comes long after crying. The farce of male grit hilariously laid bare.)

The end of Reeves]s sad-man tale was basically positive, as BoJack Horseman, the Netflix cartoon that expertly skewers every wrinkle in the entertainment industry, aptly parodied just this past season. In the show, Hollywood agent Princess Carolyn launched a sad-dog meme on behalf of her client, the perennially stoked Mr. Peanutbutter, a golden retriever incapable of expressing negativity, who was in hot water after a cheating scandal threatened to turn his show, Birthday Dad, into a flop. The meme worked so well that he became the face of destigmatized depression. To all who are unfamiliar with the show, please rest assured that all of this makes complete sense in the BoJack world.