Over-Educated Problems

About

Over-Educated Problems is an advice animal image macro series featuring a photo of a man glumly looking out a window on to a rainy street. As a spin-off of the First World Problems series, the captions typically include frustrations associated with being “too well educated” compared to one’s peers.

Origin

The original image comes from a stock photo titled “Sad Man And Rain” (shown below, left), which is available for download on the royalty free stock photo website Public Domain Pictures.^[1] On June 4th, 2012, Redditor RPShep submitted a post titled “Over-Educated Problems”^[2], which featured the photo captioned with “Don’t know whether to use correct pronunciation / or common pronunciation” (shown below, right). Within three days, the post received over 16,800 upvotes and 1,650 comments.

Spread

On June 5th, 2012, the men’s humor blog Guyism^[5] published a post titled “New Meme You Should Know: Over-Educated Problems”, which featured a slideshow of notable examples from the series. On June 6th, NeoGAF^[4] forums member shanshan310 posted several image macro examples in a thread titled “Pics that make you laugh.” On June 7th, the Internet humor site Tickld^[8] posted an image macro with the caption “I have a large vocabulary / that I can’t use around my half-retarded friends” (shown below, left). The same day, Redditor greekish submitted a post titled “How I feel about the over educated problems meme”^[7], which featured a Matrix Morpheus image macro with the caption “What if I told you / you won’t think you’re so smart after college” (shown below, right). The meme has continued to spread on sites like Pinterest^[3] and Tumblr^[6] under the tag “#over-educated problems.”

Notable Examples

Search Interest

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External References