🎬 Title Card (Bateman) Meme Generator
On 1 January you buy a planner, a water bottle the size of a fire extinguisher and a gym membership. You announce that this is the year you become a different person. By Wednesday the planner is a coaster.
The skincare routine has eleven steps now. It takes forty minutes, involves a product you can't pronounce, and your flatmate has started knocking before entering the bathroom.
You set an alarm for 5 a.m. to "win the morning". You win it for four days, then spend the fifth explaining to your manager why you're asleep in the stairwell.
Everything will change next year, obviously. This year was for planning. The new you is booked in for the first week of January, and every December the date is moved again.
Why it caught on: the picture is a still from *American Psycho* (2000), directed by Mary Harron and adapted from Bret Easton Ellis's 1991 novel, with Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman, a Wall Street banker obsessed with grooming and status. People put the film's title over a year, as a title card, to declare that year their polished, ruthlessly optimised era. It spread because everyone recognises the morning routine and the grand plan, and the year is always the next one.