Oh Shit I Took Both Pills

Submission 11,444

Part of a series on I Shoulda Never Smoke That Shit. [View Related Entries]

About

Oh Shit I Took Both Pills refers to a variant exploitable template of the I Shoulda Never Smoke That Shit format that instead suggests the meme creator shouldn't have taken both pills, referring to the red and blue pills from The Matrix movies offered to Neo by Morpheus. Memes typically use the full phrasal template "oh shit I took both pills now I'm stuck in X" and photoshop various places into the lower panel. The template originates from a late-2021 Facebook post but spread more notably on Twitter and Instagram.

Origin

On September 26th, 2021, Facebook^[1] page Reading-Berks Hotdog Society posted a meme (shown below) that used images of the sitting man in "I Shoulda Never Smoked That Shit," both the red and blue pills from The Matrix and an image of Reading, Pennsylvania. Over the course of one week, the post received 350 reactions and 951 shares. The meme was most likely inspired by news of the upcoming Matrix movie, The Matrix Resurrections, which was released in late 2021.

Spread

Although the original meme came from the aforementioned Facebook page, it didn't receive viral attention until Twitter^[2] user ZOMBIESHARK38 reposted it on December 27th, 2021. Their tweet received roughly 91,800 likes in one week.

The first variant meme to use the template was posted by Twitter^[3] user OneFeIISwoopon on December 28th, 2021 (shown below). It replaced Reading, Pennsylvania with Reno, Nevada in the bottom half of the image. It received roughly 17,500 likes in one day (seen below via reposted screenshot).^[4]

Also on December 28th, Instagram^[5] account this.and.a.blunt posted a variant of the template that replaced the bottom half of the meme with the album cover of The Choirgirl Hotel by singer Tori Amos (shown below, left). The meme amassed roughly 1,700 likes in six days. Two days later, on December 30th, Instagram^[6] account gamewatchtoday posted an Overwatch version of the template (shown below, right) that received roughly 3,700 likes in five days.

The template continued to be remixed across Instagram and Facebook going into January 2022, where notable meme creators like Instagram's trashcanpaul^[7] even hopped onto the trend, receiving roughly 127,800 likes for his version of the meme posted on December 31st. Internet users inserted their own cities into the template going forward, as well as inserting more video game references like World of Warcraft, ^[8] among others.