The man behind the meme is András István Arató, born July 11, 1945, in Kőszeg, Hungary3. A retired electrical engineer who graduated from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics in 1969, Arató stumbled into stock photography entirely by accident3.

While vacationing in Turkey, Arató uploaded personal travel photos to the Hungarian social media platform iWiW3. A professional photographer noticed the pictures and contacted him about modeling. Arató accepted the offer, and both were happy with the results of the trial shoot3. They kept working together, producing what Arató later described as "a couple hundred" stock photographs2.

The photos were uploaded to stock image sites including DreamsTime. On September 13, 2011, Facepunch forum user Greenen72 posted several of these stock photos featuring Arató, still bearing the DreamsTime watermark2. This is the earliest known archived thread where Harold attracted attention as a meme subject.

Arató had agreed to the photos being used as stock images, with one condition: no use in content about politics, religion, or sex, topics he felt were too sensitive3. The internet, predictably, did not honor those boundaries.

Hide The Pain Harold crossed from meme into mainstream recognition in several ways. Arató's 2018 TEDx Talk in Kyiv put a human face on the experience of becoming a meme involuntarily, and his honest discussion of the emotional journey attracted widespread coverage2.

Coca-Cola tapped Arató as their advertising face in Hungary in 2019, a major brand deal that showed how meme fame could translate into real commercial value3. His appearance on the Hungarian Masked Singer in 2020 brought him to an even wider domestic audience3.

The r/youdontsurf subreddit, created in 2013, built an entire community around the kind of stock photo humor Harold pioneered2. While not exclusively a Harold community, his face was its most iconic fixture and helped establish "edited stock photos with absurd captions" as its own meme genre.

Arató's story also became a frequently cited example in discussions about meme ethics, consent in the age of viral images, and what happens when your face becomes public property against your will.

Arató's journey from accidental meme to self-aware internet celebrity is one of the more unusual arcs in meme history. Before any of it happened, he had a full career as an electrical engineer, winning the János Urbanek Prize in 2002 and the Déri Miksa Award in 2010, both from the Hungarian Electrotechnical Association3. He was also a contestant on the Hungarian version of Jeopardy! in 1996 and worked as a DJ for a local radio station for five years after retirement3.

When Arató first discovered his photos being used as memes, he was not pleased. He found pictures of himself repurposed as a doctor on a hospital website, and later discovered his face pasted onto all four faces of Mount Rushmore3. He considered taking legal action but decided there was "no solution, only a temporary solution"2. The photographer had asked him to smile during their sessions, and Arató admitted he simply got tired of smiling too much, which created the slightly strained expression that launched the whole phenomenon3.

Sites like MemeCenter turned his photos into image macros, often with jokes about sex and similar subjects, exactly the kind of content he'd tried to exclude from his stock photo agreement2. Arató struggled with the situation for years. He once compared it to his own childhood habit of drawing on pictures of the Hungarian poet John Arany in his school textbooks, making the poet look like a pirate3. That moment of self-recognition helped him accept what was happening to his own image.

The 4chan thread in May 2014 marked a turning point in how people engaged with Harold. Rather than just slapping text on his photos, users constructed an elaborate fictional universe around his apparent sadness2. The character "Harold" became a stock photography model trapped in an unfulfilling life, smiling through the pain of existence. This narrative layer elevated him from a simple image macro to a character people genuinely cared about.

After revealing his identity in 2016, Arató leaned into his meme fame. In September 2018, he hosted a TEDx Talk in Kyiv, Ukraine, where he discussed his life as a "meme-hero" and traced the whole story from the Turkish vacation photos to his eventual acceptance2. He explained how meme content from the United States spread to Europe and then the rest of the world3. The TEDx Talk was uploaded to YouTube on June 25, 2019, and pulled in more than 580,000 views in three days2.

In April 2020, Know Your Meme interviewed Arató as part of their editorial series following up with people featured in well-known memes2. He shared detailed information about how the stock photos became memes and how he learned to embrace the Harold persona.

Arató's post-meme career took some unexpected turns. In 2019, he became the advertising face of Coca-Cola in Hungary3. In 2020, he appeared as the character "Szörnyecske" (Little Monster) on the Hungarian version of Masked Singer, broadcast on RTL Klub3. As recently as 2025, he presented an award at the Hungarian Sportspeople of the Year gala alongside canoeist Rita Kőbán3.