10 year challenge

10 year challenge (How Did Age Hit You, #2009vs2019, GlowUpChallenge) — a photography comparison challenge in which people publish photos of themselves, taken 10 years ago. Also is a meme with two pictures parodying the challenge.

Origin of 10 year challenge

How Hard Did Aging Hit You Challenge was started on Facebook.

It is believed that the first prominent user to partake in the challenge was Damon Lane, chief meteorologist for KOCO News 5 in Oklahoma. The post appeared on his facebook page on January 11th, 2019.

Initially, the meaning of the challenge was to compare your first profile picture with your current one. Then people just began to publish photos of themselves from 10 years ago (in 2009) adjacent to a recent image of them from 2019. So the challenge has several names: 2009 vs. 2019, How Did Age Hit You or 10 year challenge.

Over the following weekend, social media users started to post their entries in the challenge and it became popular.

10 year challenge meme

With the growing popularity of the challenge, new memes appeared, to make it even more entertaining. People began to post pictures of animals, movie characters in the style of the challenge.

It is worth noting that the trend is similar to 2017’s “Puberty Challenge,” where people showcased photos from before and after the awkward transition to adulthood. In 2018, the #GlowUpChallenge was popular — it started from photos of Miley Cyrus at the Oscars and grew into a large-scale comparison of photos of people in 2012 and 2018.