A rant on brain rot

Who knew the word of the year could get me so fired up?

Brain rot, the selected 2024 Oxford Word of the Year, raises a particularly grotesque visual — decaying gray matter inside our skull, inside our living bodies —while symbolizing the actual decay of our collective culture.

If you haven’t heard the word before, I’ll share this snippet direct from Oxford University Press:

“The first recorded use of ‘brain rot’ was found in 1854 in Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden, which reports his experiences of living a simple lifestyle in the natural world. As part of his conclusions, Thoreau criticizes society’s tendency to devalue complex ideas, or those that can be interpreted in multiple ways, in favour of simple ones, and sees this as indicative of a general decline in mental and intellectual effort: ‘While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot – which prevails so much more widely and fatally?’

In 2024, ‘brain rot’ is used to describe both the cause and effect of this, referring to low-quality, low-value content found on social media and the internet, as well as the subsequent negative impact that consuming this type of content is perceived to have on an individual or society.”

For some reason, the fact that this was chosen as the word of the year is driving me a bit mad. Why are we embracing the term “brain rot,” yet resisting change as a society? How can we be so accepting of the concept that we may be becoming dumber?

A defense mechanism

My most gracious interpretation of this is to assume that all of this is a defense mechanism —our society is “memefying” a true problem to protect ourselves from the truth.

If you take this statistic that the average person uses their phone for nearly 5 hours a day, that’s equivalent to 76 days a year, almost 2.5 months. I accept that some of that time is productive, but I have to wonder when we’ll decide that enough is enough. Is it 6 hours? 8 hours? Will we be living an episode of Black Mirror before we collectively wake up and start fighting back?

Doom scrolling isn’t the only problem, the only cause of “brain rot.” Our culture is trapped in these social and online spaces where it’s impossible to use our brains properly, to find true depth, to exercise our brains, to mind wander, to experience life instead of watching snippets of other peoples lives.

Are we afraid to really look inward at our true problem and then outward to make real change?

I guess I know the answer is partly yes. I knew for years that my habits and relationship with tech were detrimental to my own life. I wasted so much time before I felt capable of making change. Why am I so fired up that others are experiencing the same?

So what can we do?

And look — it’s not our fault. I know that. I hope you know that. For every time you might think, “wow this app is giving me brain rot,” there’s a room full of engineers and designers who are working to keep you sucked in.

But by turning our addiction into a joke, we’re letting them win. We’re letting them take control of our thoughts and our actions.

It’s time to take our brain rot seriously, and instead, start a movement for real change.

This is my call to action. If you are joking that your brain is rotting, consider that you have the power to change. You don’t have to subscribe to a life of brain rot. You can make changes in your life, and inspire others to too.