If you’re on Instagram Reels, Twitter/X or TikTok, there’s a good chance you’ve seen the video of Ashton Hall and his insane morning routine. Starting at 3:52 a.m., Hall, a male fitness influencer, embarks on a nearly six-hour ritual.

He brushes his teeth with Saratoga Spring water, works out, eats a banana, rubs the peel all over his face, goes for a swim, dunks his face in Saratoga water twice, reads the Bible and listens to a sermon. All this while being catered to by a faceless female assistant, of course. I thought the entire video was ridiculous, and the Internet agreed.

So, when my feed was flooded with X users mocking the video, TikTok creators buying Saratoga water and bananas in bulk and endless parodies, I wasn’t surprised; it was clearly the viral meme of the week. It became one of those moments where everyone was in on the joke, and the joke just kept getting funnier the more it spread.

But when I woke up two days later and saw that Hall was already making videos with MrBeast and corporate social media accounts like the Baltimore Ravens and “Saturday Night Live” had already made their own versions of the video, I had to ask myself: Why are brands catching onto our memes so fast?

It’s well established that teenagers and young adults have long driven meme culture, setting the tone for what goes viral online. In the early 2010s, millennial teens dominated internet humor with Tumblr screenshots, reaction images, deep-fried memes and Vines.

But by the late 2010s, those same jokes were being mass produced, or “brandified,” by companies like BuzzFeed, as millennials entered the workforce and took over social media roles for major brands.

Now, Gen Z is experiencing a similar shift.

The consensus among Gen Z is that memes generally stop being funny once they’re overused, especially in ad campaigns by brands. But even if we see the meme as dead, it doesn’t disappear—it just stops being funny. It starts showing up in brand tweets, marketing emails and Instagram ads. Brands view memes as the way to market to our age group.

Suddenly, Fashion Nova is selling shirts that say, “it’s giving,” or we’re being told that drinking Sprite makes you a “chill guy.” A joke that once felt niche suddenly feels calculated and cringe. And as much as we blame brands for that death, we may be part of the reason it’s happening faster.

In the early 2020s, most Gen Zers were teenagers, which meant we began dominating online culture. Yet, most of us were too young to be running corporate accounts or shaping online brand voices.

Millennials were still the ones in charge, often needing a few weeks to catch up with our humor and cultural references.

But today, as more members of Gen Z graduate and take on roles in marketing, social media and content creation, the delay is getting shorter. Brands, influencers and our usual “meme-killers” are catching up faster than ever, because we are now the ones behind the curtain.

As Gen Z becomes the voice of both the internet and the brands trying to capitalize on it, the speed of meme commodification is only increasing. The generation that once complained about brands ruining jokes may now be the ones unintentionally doing it themselves.

Though our generation has become this voice on the internet, we will eventually grow out of meme culture and Gen Alpha will replace us. Sooner than we think, we’ll be the ones who are too behind to get what’s funny. We’ll be the ones scrounging the internet, trying to make sense of Gen Alpha’s references just like we once mocked older generations for doing with ours.

 Melanie Guilderson can be reached at [email protected].