First World Problems

The phrase came first¶

Long before the crying-woman photo, “first world problem” existed as ordinary slang. The earliest widely cited use is a lyric in the Matthew Good Band’s 1995 song “Omissions of the Omen.” Urban Dictionary logged a definition on August 10, 2005, glossing it as problems from living in a wealthy, industrialised nation that people elsewhere would roll their eyes at. A Tumblr blog, “The Real First World Problems,” launched November 26, 2008; Something Awful ran a Comedy Goldmine thread titled “#firstworldproblems” on June 9, 2009; and Jessica Hagy diagrammed the concept on her blog Indexed on November 5, 2010. Louis C.K.’s “white people problems” routine on the January 2011 album Hilarious pushed the same idea into stand-up.

The image macro¶

The advice-animal version arrived in 2011, pairing a stock photograph of a woman crying with a hand pressed to her face against a trivially minor complaint. The subreddit /r/firstworldproblems was created on January 19, 2011; BuzzFeed posted a compilation on March 23, 2011; and hashtag use of #firstworldproblems reportedly peaked around July 1, 2011. By November 7, 2011 the crying-woman template had accumulated 1,435 submissions on Quickmeme, with a secondary version featuring a teenage boy slumped against a wall drawing another 235.

Meaning and usage¶

The entire joke is the mismatch between the operatic tears and the pettiness of the grievance:

• “My phone died so I had to talk to people.”
• “I have 200 channels and nothing to watch.”
• “My heated seats are too hot.”

It is self-aware privilege humour rather than mockery of anyone else. People deploy it to pre-empt criticism of their own complaining — a way of saying “I know this isn’t a real problem, but” before griping anyway. That built-in self-check is why it aged better than most advice animals, and why the phrase survives independently of the image, often tagged simply as #firstworldproblems.

The Water Is Life campaign¶

In 2012 the charity WATERisLIFE, working with agency DDB New York, built a campaign explicitly designed to kill the hashtag. The “First World Problems Anthem” collected real #firstworldproblems tweets and had Haitians — many of them living in conditions left by the 2010 earthquake — read them aloud to camera. The 60-second spot went on to win a Bronze Lion at Cannes Lions in 2013 and was reportedly viewed several million times on YouTube, and it is still cited as a landmark example of a nonprofit hijacking a meme rather than making one.

Legacy¶

The macro faded with the rest of the advice-animal wave, but the phrase did not. “First world problem” is now plain English, used in conversation by people who have never seen the image. It sits in the same family as Hide the Pain Harold and This Is Fine: formats built around performing distress that the poster knows is not really warranted, and getting the laugh from the gap.