Suffering From Success

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Part of a series on DJ Khaled. [View Related Entries]

About

Suffering From Success refers to a music album released by American producer DJ Khaled on October 22nd, 2013. In 2018, the album cover showing the producer wearing an expression of suffering gained popularity as an image macro.

Origin

On July 31st, 2013, covers for standard (shown below, left) and deluxe (shown below, right) editions of upcoming DJ Khaled album "Suffering from Success" were released^[1]. Both covers showed the same image of DJ Khaled donned in jewelry and wearing an expression of suffering, with his forehead resting on his right hand. The album was released on October 22nd, 2013.

Before August 23rd, 2015, Tumblr^[2] user milesupshur posted the album cover together with a caption "when u make a popular post and it blows up your notifications". The post gained over 247,000 likes and reblogs in three years.

Spread

On July 10th, 2017, a meme posted in UC Berkeley Memes for Edgy Teens Facebook group on July 9th that year was included in a report published by New York Magazine^[3].

On July 14th, 2017, Redditor^[4] CloudTower posted a version of the meme to /r/MemeEconomy subreddit. The post gained over 370 upvotes within six months. On May 21st, 2018, CloudTower made another post to /r/dankmemes^[5], which gained 4,300 upvotes within six months.

Through 2018, several notable versions of the meme were posted on Reddit, including /r/memes^[6], /r/teenagers^[7] and /r/dankmemes^[8] subreddits.

By December 2018 the macro reached mainstream popularity on Reddit, with numerous examples being posted to /r/dankmemes, /r/me_irl and other subreddits.