RIP to the sadness monkeys

 

There’s something deeply human about grief, and even more so when it touches the animals we see ourselves in. The sadness monkeys — not an official species, but a name born from the internet’s love for emotionally expressive creatures — became an icon of quiet mourning, of sorrow we couldn’t quite articulate ourselves. Perhaps they were macaques, or maybe capuchins — it didn’t matter. What mattered was the look in their eyes: a softness, a melancholy, a mirror.

RIP to the sadness monkeys.

They were not famous in the traditional sense. No glossy National Geographic features, no Instagram sponsorships. They lived in fragments — a viral video, a photo passed around forums, a meme captioned with “when the void stares back.” They weren’t funny, not really. They were moments of recognition. The hunched posture, the downturned gaze, the way they held onto each other like they were the only warmth in the world. We laughed because it was too real.

We projected onto them. That’s what humans do — we see ourselves in everything. But the sadness monkeys didn’t resist it. They sat still and let us. In a world constantly moving, constantly demanding energy, their stillness was sacred. They seemed to say, “It’s okay to just be. To feel the heavy things. To not be okay.”

And now they’re gone, or at least the moment is.

Maybe the original monkey died. Maybe the forest they lived in was bulldozed for a resort. Maybe the sadness monkeys still live somewhere, sitting together in the trees, unaware that we made them symbols of a kind of existential grief. Or maybe the sadness lives on in us, and that’s why we remember them.

RIP sadness monkeys — not because you did something extraordinary, but because you didn’t. Because in a world that rewards spectacle, you just sat and felt something, and it reminded us of ourselves. You didn’t perform. You didn’t hide. You just existed with your sadness, openly, and in doing so, gave us permission to do the same.

In mourning them, we mourn the small, quiet parts of ourselves that rarely get attention. We mourn the stillness. The ability to feel deeply without needing to explain. We mourn the connection between species that happens not in laboratories or zoos, but in a flicker of shared emotion through a screen. We mourn the innocence of animals, and the way we co-opt their lives into stories that make sense to us.

But maybe the sadness monkeys wouldn’t want us to be sad forever. Maybe they’d just want us to sit a little more. Hold each other a little tighter. Say less. Feel more.

Wherever they are — whether swinging through forgotten jungles or eternally looping in a 12-second video clip on someone’s hard drive — may they rest peacefully.

RIP sadness monkeys.