The story spent most of a year and a half circulating on 4chan and Reddit before it turned into a shareable meme template. A screenshot of the original posts landed on /r/4chan in July 2021, and a repost on /r/greentext in January 2022 pulled roughly 28,900 upvotes over the following year3. Reddit built the audience, but the format itself was still lagging behind the underlying story.

That gap closed on Twitter in January 2023, when a chain of viral posts from accounts including @EndingBigly, @catholicspaceem, and @thuleanrevenant built the setup into a repeatable image-macro format, with @thuleanrevenant's screenshot of a real user answering literally picking up over 530 retweets and 6,400 likes in a week3. That thread triggered a wider spike of Breakfast Question memes in late January 20231. The format later showed up in mainstream podcast content, most notably on the Whatever podcast, where the host tried the question on a guest who had genuinely skipped breakfast that morning, breaking the setup because the hypothetical stopped being hypothetical1.

A Substack essayist at Rejoice Evermore later pointed out that when the counterfactual scenario is actually true, it's the question, not the answer, that stops making sense1. A LinkedIn 'Know Your Meme of the Day' post also carried a summary of the entry to that platform's professional feed4.