--- title: "Hide the Pain Harold is András Arató, a retired Hungarian electrical engineer who became a meme in 2011" url: https://badiyaa.com/hide-the-pain-harold-andras-arato/ published: 2026-11-15T10:00:00+00:00 modified: 2026-11-15T10:00:00+00:00 section: Offbeat publisher: Badiyaa --- # Hide the Pain Harold is András Arató, a retired Hungarian electrical engineer who became a meme in 2011 Hide the Pain Harold is András Arató, a Hungarian electrical engineer born in 1945 whose strained stock-photo smile became a meme in 2011. The face behind Hide the Pain Harold, one of the longest-running reaction images online, belongs to András István Arató, a Hungarian electrical engineer born on 11 July 1945 in the western town of Kőszeg. His route into internet fame started with a vacation. Arató posted holiday pictures from a trip on iWiW, an early Hungarian social network. A professional photographer spotted them, asked whether he would model, and after a first session that both of them liked, kept inviting him back. More than a hundred stock images came out of those sittings. ## How a polite smile turned into a punchline The photographer kept telling Arató to smile, and he has said he grew tired of smiling so much during the shoot. Viewers saw the strain. The grin looked like a mask over quiet misery, and by 2011 people online had renamed him Harold and were captioning him as the patron saint of enduring things while pretending to be fine. Arató learned what was happening the way many accidental celebrities do: he searched for himself. Image results showed him posing as a doctor on a hospital homepage. A few months later he found his face pasted onto all four presidents on Mount Rushmore. He did not enjoy it at first and insisted he was not a “funny guy”. Then he remembered drawing on a portrait of a Hungarian poet in his own schoolbooks to turn him into a pirate. He also concluded that getting pages removed would be pointless, because the pictures would simply pop up again elsewhere. After about six years he made peace with being a meme. The jokes spread first among American users, then across Europe and the rest of the world. One reason the meme lasted is that many fans assumed Harold was not a real person. An anonymous user tracked down his identity and emailed him about it. After several such messages, Arató posted a photo of himself on his Russian fan page holding a handwritten sign that read “I’M ALIVE” in Russian. Within a few hours more than ten thousand people had seen it. ## From stock model to paid celebrity Fame turned into work. In 2019 he became the advertising face of Coca-Cola in Hungary. In 2020 he competed in the Hungarian version of The Masked Singer, hidden inside a costume called Little Monster. In 2025 he handed out the award for best community sports event at Hungary’s Sportspeople of the Year gala alongside canoeist Rita Kőbán. He has also told his own story on stage in a TEDxKyiv talk titled “Waking up as a meme hero”. Long before any of that he had a solid engineering career. He graduated in electrical engineering from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics in 1969 and later won two awards from the Hungarian Electrotechnical Association for work in lighting technology. He was a contestant on the Hungarian edition of Jeopardy! in 1996 and, after retiring, spent five years as a DJ on a local radio station. ## Harold at a glance - 1945: born in Kőszeg, Hungary - 1969: electrical engineering degree in Budapest - 2002 and 2010: lighting-technology awards, the János Urbanek Prize and the Déri Miksa Award - 2011: the stock photos become the Hide the Pain Harold meme - 2019: advertising face of Coca-Cola in Hungary - 2020: Masked Singer contestant as Little Monster Put side by side, the dates show something unusual: Arató was in his mid-sixties when the meme took off, and he built a second, very public career in his seventies. Stock photography keeps feeding internet culture, from [three Tokyo friends who dressed up as a corporate stock photo for Halloween](https://badiyaa.com/jimi-halloween-mundane-costumes-tokyo-stock-photo/) to the way [a single clapping cat clip turned into a global reaction image](https://badiyaa.com/clapping-cat-meme-origin-ai/). Arató set one firm rule when he agreed to the original shoots: his pictures could be sold for almost anything except material about politics, religion and sex. ## Further reading - [Wikipedia: Hide the Pain Harold](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hide_the_Pain_Harold) *Image: Szilas, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons* *This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. [How we work](https://badiyaa.com/editorial-policy/).*