The Truth About This ‘164 YEAR OLD MAN’

The Truth About This ‘164 YEAR OLD MAN’

A girl started posting simple videos of her grandfather on TikTok. Just a quiet old man in a hospital bed, barely moving, eyes closed, skin stretched so thin you could see every bone in his body. Within weeks, those videos exploded. We are talking hundreds of millions of views. Then the internet did what the internet does best.

It turned him into something he never was. People called him 164 years old. Others said he was a 399-year-old woman. Some swore he was mummifying himself alive. And then, while the whole world was busy laughing and lying about him, something happened that silenced everyone. But nobody was paying attention by then. People love to throw the word “viral” around like it is always a good thing.

Like it is always fame and fortune and confetti. But for a 29-year-old woman named Aui from a tiny corner of Northeast Thailand, going viral was the worst thing that ever happened to her family. Let me take you back. Way back. 1912. A boy was born in Nakhon Ratchasima, Thailand. The eldest son in a family of 11 children.

You would think the firstborn would be the strongest, right? Not this kid. He was the weakest of all of them. Spent his entire childhood in and out of the hospital. Fevers, sickness, constant. While the other kids were outside playing in the fields, this boy was stuck indoors fighting just to stay breathing. Doctors looked at his mother and gave her a number.

“20.”

They said he would not live past 20 years old. That was the ceiling. That was all they gave her. Now imagine being that mother. You have 11 mouths to feed and the doctors just told you your oldest is going to die before he even becomes a man. What do you do? What she did next, it haunts me. She made a decision that most people would never understand.

She decided that his only chance of survival was to give him away. Not to a stranger, to the local Buddhist temple. She figured if he became a monk, lived a quiet life, no stress, no labor, just prayer and meditation, maybe, just maybe, he would make it a little longer. So, the day he turned 20, she let him go. She handed her firstborn son to the temple and walked away.

And that boy, the one the doctors said would not survive, he did not just make it past 20. He made it past 30, past 50, past 70, past 90, past 100. 89 years later, he was still there. Still in that same temple, still praying, still meditating, still alive. His name was Luang Pho Yai, and he was 109 years old. His granddaughter, Aui, grew up watching him at the Wat Ban Klang temple.

She remembered him being there since she was a little girl. And when he got older and his body started breaking down, when he lost his eyesight, when his hearing faded, she did not leave. She stayed. She fed him his favorite cartons of milk every morning. She talked to him even though he could not hear her anymore.

She cleaned him. She did his physiotherapy. Every single day. Not for clout, not for followers, because she felt it was her responsibility. Then in January 2022, everything changed. He fell in the bathroom inside the temple. His head hit the ground hard. Two fractures. Just like that, the man who had spent 89 years standing in prayer became bedridden.

Aui rushed him to Dan Khun Thao Hospital in an ambulance. And that is when she started posting the videos. Simple clips. Him lying in bed, him being fed through a syringe, him sitting up for the first time after weeks. She was not making content. She was documenting her grandfather’s fight and the world could not look away.

One video of her giving him water through a syringe pulled in 30 million views. Another of him just sitting up in bed hit 35 million in less than a week. But there was one video, one single clip that changed everything. She filmed the moment her grandfather, blind, deaf, barely able to lift his arms, reached out and gently patted his great-granddaughter on the head.

That is it. That is all he did. A 109-year-old man tapping a little girl’s head. That video hit 187 million views. Let that number sit with you. But here is where it gets ugly. Because while Aui was filming out of love, the rest of the internet was stealing her videos and turning them into lies. Random accounts ripped the clips from her page, slapped fake captions on them, and spread them everywhere.

One said he was 163 years old. Another said 164. Then someone decided he was a 399-year-old woman. Others claimed he was practicing something called Sokushinbutsu, a Japanese ritual where monks mummify themselves while still alive. None of it was true. Not a single word. People just saw a frail old man and decided the truth was not interesting enough.

And then came the jokes, the comments, millions of strangers calling him “bro,” saying he lived longer than dinosaurs, saying he invented terms and conditions. Some people straight-up called him a corpse to his face. In the comments of videos his granddaughter was posting from his hospital bed, Aui begged them to stop.

She responded to one comment asking people not to call him a corpse. She told the media, “People took the video from my account without my permission. He is very respected in Thailand.” But nobody listened. The memes kept coming. The lies kept spreading. Fact-checking websites from Snopes to Newsweek had to publish entire articles just to tell the world that no, this man was not 164 years old. He was 109.

And he was real. Meanwhile, through all of that noise, something quiet was happening in that hospital room. Aui kept posting updates. His health seemed to be improving. He was eating again. He was sitting up. Villagers from the temple were coming to visit. She even wheeled him outside to watch the kids prepare for an annual event at the temple.

For a moment, it looked like the man who beat every deadline life ever gave him was going to do it again. And then on March 22nd, 2022, at exactly 6:40 in the evening, he was gone. Just like that. 109 years, 343 days. 22 days short of his 110th birthday. The boy who was not supposed to live past 20 outlived nearly every human being on the planet.

And then slipped away quietly in a hospital bed while the internet was still arguing about whether he was 164 or 399. But here is the part that wrecks me. The part nobody talks about. Before he died, he spoke to Aui, a blind deaf man who could barely move found a way to give his granddaughter final instructions. Orders. Things he needed her to do.

And then, according to Aui herself, he said goodbye. On his own terms. He knew it was coming. And he faced it the same way he faced everything in his 109 years. With peace. With purpose. With his granddaughter right there beside him. After he passed, a group of monks came and surrounded his body in the hospital bed.

They performed the funeral watering ceremony for Luang Ta Aka. 89 years after he walked into that temple as a sick dying boy, his brothers came to carry him home. The internet did not stop, though. Even after he died, the videos kept pulling hundreds of millions of views. One posted just days after his death crossed 150 million.

The algorithm did not know he was gone. It just kept feeding his face to strangers who never knew his name, never knew his story, and never bothered to ask. So the next time you see a video of someone and the caption says something unbelievable, stop for a second. Because behind that screen, there might be a granddaughter who just lost the only person she ever took care of.

And she is watching you laugh.