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You don’t need to broadcast your routine to the world. Seriously. If you glanced at social media over the weekend for even half a second, you probably saw former Alcorn State running back turned online fitness coach Ashton Hall getting roasted like a Thanksgiving turkey for his “Day in the Life” video. Hall, whose brief football career included just six carries for eight yards, has built millions of followers by existing in a state of perpetual shirtlessness, posting routines practically begging for mockery.
He wakes up at 3 AM—already a red flag unless you’re heading to a workplace or training to fight Rocky Balboa. Hall proceeds through embarrassingly light workouts anyone with basic motor skills could finish in about 20 minutes.
The real kicker? His bizarre beauty rituals: dunking his face in crisp Saratoga sparkling water (like $4 per bottle, for those keeping score), journaling, and methodically rubbing banana peels on his face in pursuit of some questionable skincare benefit.
He wraps it all up by intensely speaking into a microphone about “hitting 10,000,” presumably views, engagements, or some other vanity metric. Hall’s entire shtick screams BIG MAIN CHARACTER ENERGY—loud, self-absorbed, and utterly absurd.
Sure, Hall’s b-roll is crisp, the lighting immaculate, and the production value expertly gamifies the algorithm to rack up millions of views. But beneath the slick editing, there’s zero actual substance. It’s not funny, it’s not endearing, and it’s hard to imagine anyone genuinely walking away inspired to chase their best life or peak performance.
It’s like a Nike ad packed with empty-calorie hustle clichés, designed purely for virality with no meaningful takeaway. No one’s watching this thinking, “Wow, I need this to live my best life.” It’s uninspiring. It offers no real path toward living an intentional, disciplined, or fulfilling existence—just classic hustle culture lameness that’s easily turned into a meme:
Main Character Syndrome Has Jumped the Shark
Yet, he’s hardly alone. “Day in the Life” videos exploded with TikTok’s rise, quickly migrating to Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts. It’s the misguided belief that every mundane aspect of our lives deserves airtime, as if we’re all starring in our own personal reality TV show.
These routine videos began innocently—mundane commutes, oatmeal breakfasts, cozy desk setups. Soon, these routines became grotesquely exaggerated, morphing everyday life into elaborate productions featuring slow-motion coffee pours and gratuitous journaling montages. They quickly lost their charm and became incredibly hacky. It’s all a desperate bid to turn ordinary existence into cinematic gold.
Social media thrives on vanity and inflated Main Character Energy, but it’s hitting a tipping point. This sort of narcissistic oversharing is exactly why more people are disengaging online and choosing to thrive offline, where life is healthier and more authentic. The performative nature of social media and the self-obsessed “creator culture” has drained it of fun, replacing genuine moments with algorithmic pandering. The cultural backlash is real and growing.
Millennials and Gen Z are increasingly exhausted by the performative, cringe-inducing nature of this content. A recent Newsweek article highlights a broader revolt against hyperconnectivity: younger people are deliberately deleting social media, swapping smartphones for dumbphones, and embracing digital minimalism. Oxford University Press even named “brain rot”—the cognitive decay caused by excessive online saturation—as its 2024 Word of the Year. Kate Cassidy Fletcher, a former TikTok monetization specialist, told Newsweek how deleting social media improved her mental clarity and allowed her to reconnect with real-life interactions. Similarly, Alex Edwards, a young entrepreneur, abandoned his Instagram and TikTok, finding immediate relief and a quieter mind, according to the Newsweek article.
Both examples underline that being offline is rapidly becoming a new luxury and a powerful status symbol. If your social circles are anything like mine, people are actively reducing their screen time in reaction to the hyper-online cringiness. Authentic human connection doesn’t require broadcasting every waking moment to giant tech companies that exploit your addiction for ad dollars.
Being present and attentive to the people physically around you is a superpower in life, and it’s a far more important and noble one than posting videos of you brushing your teeth or doing an ice bath for clout. It’s officially time to do less.
Routines are meant to be unremarkable. Humans evolved to thrive on predictable, frictionless habits. Sure, we love outlandish routines—take Hunter S. Thompson’s notoriously embellished (but wildly entertaining) daily schedule, as told to the writer E. Jean Caroll. Thompson claimed he woke at 3 PM, immediately indulging in Chivas Regal, cocaine, and cigarettes, fueling his night with LSD, champagne, and manic writing binges that ended around 8 AM. and that’s exactly what made it entertaining.
It was completely unhealthy and completely hyperbolic, which made it entertaining precisely because it was absurd. Or consider Mark Wahlberg’s absurd routine that he shared with the world in 2018: waking at 2:30 AM, hitting multiple workouts, squeezing in golf, and spending precisely 30 minutes staying “prayed up.” The internet mocked Wahlberg mercilessly for his saintly, hyper-disciplined performance, but it also became a part of Marky Mark lore.
When “Day in the Life” Becomes “Layoff in the Life”
Even corporate “Day in the Life” videos have spectacularly backfired. Remember all those viral TikToks and YouTube videos featuring software engineers from Google and Meta? Lavish amenities, rooftop yoga, smoothie bars, and endless kombucha taps filled our feeds, creating the illusion that working at these tech giants was more spa day than grind. But the reality check was brutal: during mass layoffs, these handsomely paid influencers—clocking barely two or three hours of actual work per day, as the internet gleefully pointed out—were among the first on the chopping block.
One notorious example involved a Google employee who went viral on LinkedIn after bitterly complaining about his layoff—despite openly admitting he’d earned over $1 million annually without being assigned to a single project for two entire years. Posting these videos wasn’t just cringe; it was a glaring admission to bosses (and the world) of how little actual work was happening. See the issue? Maintaining some mystery about your daily grind is smart, especially when it comes to the people responsible for keeping you employed. Broadcasting your cushy corporate existence isn’t just embarrassing—it can be professional self-sabotage.
Routine videos have officially jumped the shark—they’re the pumpkin spice latte of digital content, predictable and begging for mockery.
If your daily life isn’t Thompson-level insane or Wahlberg-level disciplined, sharing your routine online probably won’t end well. Thompson and Wahlberg were building legend; today’s wannabe influencers are chasing imaginary fame driven by hollow social media metrics. Routine oversharing quickly becomes tiresome and pointless.
Here’s hoping we see fewer of these cringe-inducing videos clogging our feeds. The mundane isn’t compelling—it’s just mundane, and it’s silly that the influencer industrial complex has embraced this format for clout.
Sharing your routine might feel like easy content, but it’ll more likely make you a laughingstock or worse, unemployed.
Keep the banana peels off your face, and please, keep your boring morning routines offline.
Brandon Wenerd is BroBible’s publisher. Follow him on Instagram here.
Content shared from brobible.com.