The Humans of New York (HONY) meme is a parody of Brandon Stanton’s famous photography project that began in 2010, featuring intimate portraits and personal stories of New Yorkers. While the original project is known for its emotional depth and sincerity, the meme version subverts these expectations by pairing similar high-quality street portraits with captions that are absurd, narcissistic, or completely nonsensical. It gained massive popularity as a way to mock 'main character syndrome' and the trend of overly dramatic social media storytelling. The format typically involves a quote that starts off sounding like a profound life lesson but quickly devolves into a mundane or bizarre punchline.