08/12/2026
"Welcome to Costco, I love you."
Mike Judge wrote that as a joke in 2006, in a movie about a country that got too dumb to notice it was dumb. Now it's how every third reel on Instagram signs off.
Nobody independently decides, on their own, to end a video the exact same way as ten thousand strangers.
That's not a coincidence, that's a mimic pattern. Somebody taught it: some guru, some course, some swipe file that's been passed hand to hand so many times nobody remembers who it started with.
You see it once, you don't register it. Twice, you notice. By twenty, you're marinating in it and you've forgotten it was ever a choice.
I spent years as a social media specialist & know the difference between a trend and a template. This is a template. And templates are how you wake up as a copy of somebody else's copy.
W**d through what you consume, or it ends up wearing you like a suit. That's when it stops being fun, and it stops being yours.
Credit where it's due: Idiocracy, 2006, directed by Mike Judge. Not even gonna pretend it's just this one gag, the man's entire catalog is on my influence list. Idiocracy's just the hill I'd die on.
🎬 Mike Judge
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