Drowning High Five

Born from the delightfully bleak pen of Russian artist Gudim on June 19, 2017, Drowning High Five arrived as a two-panel meditation on humanity's spectacular inability to provide useful assistance. A hand reaches desperately from the water. Another hand appears—salvation at last—and delivers a hearty high five. The drowning continues.

The format spread through Instagram's 43,000 likes before finding its true calling on Reddit's r/2meirl4meirl, where self-deprecating millennials recognized a kindred spirit. By 2018, the Sarcasm Society had claimed it for Facebook, and the object-labeling gold rush began. Every conceivable misfortune got the treatment: exes drowning, Stack Overflow closing your question, Reddit automod removing your post, your therapist suggesting you "try yoga."

It ran in the same circles as Drowning In Shallow Water and Mother Ignoring Kid Drowning in a Pool—a loosely affiliated support group of aquatic despair. Peak absurdity arrived in January 2019, when a single Reddit post racked up 34,000 points by labeling the drowning hand "me with any problem" and the high-fiving hand "my brain at 3am reminding me of that embarrassing thing I did in 2007."

But you can only high-five so many drowning people before the gesture loses its sting. By 2020, the template had been applied to every possible scenario of unhelpful assistance, leaving nothing left to satirize. The well ran dry—ironically, the one place where drowning would have been impossible.

Here lies Drowning High Five: it reached out, and we left it hanging.