Two Buttons
Where it came from
A webcomic panel by Jake Clark from 2014, featuring a sweating cartoon man agonizing over which of two red buttons to press. Became a meme template around 2018.
A guy in a collared shirt is sweating bullets over two red buttons. Both buttons have labels. The joke is that the two options are either identical, contradictory, or both equally bad, and the guy is visibly losing it trying to pick. "Get enough sleep" / "Stay up reading about a topic I'll never need". He's dying inside.
It's a self-roast format. You use it when you're calling yourself out for some dumb internal conflict — usually one where the "right" choice is obvious and you're about to pick the wrong one anyway. The sweating is doing all the work. Without the sweat it's just a guy looking at buttons.
Still widely used, especially on Twitter for relatable-struggle posts. One of the few late-2010s formats that hasn't aged out yet.
Search interest, over time
↳ data courtesy of google trends
