Give your poor, tattered grey matter some respite

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 07/12/2024 (348 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I don’t like thinking about my brain.

The fluids, the folds, the wrinkles — all of that squishy-sounding stuff is absolutely none of my business. The terms “brain stem” and “myelin sheath” make me very uncomfortable.

I don’t like knowing my brain weighs three pounds. I don’t like thinking about how fragile it is, how temporary it is, how much it holds and how much it’s already forgotten.

So it’s especially disquieting to think too literally about “brain rot,” or Oxford University Press’s Word of the Year.

Oxford defines brain rot as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration.”

Or, put another way: scrolling feel good, brain want meme candy yum.

“Brain rot” evokes some uncomfortable images, though, doesn’t it? Maybe you’re imagining a gunky mass snaked out of a sink, or the pulpy remains of some forgotten vegetable in the crisper drawer.

My brain rot looks like a geode, dark and cavernous and sparkling, crusted with sugar — a cavity within my skull.

Like a cavity, you can feel it happening, the brain rot.

Like eating too much candy, you know the endless toggling between Instagram stories, TikToks and tweets is bad for you. You know it’s eroding your attention span and dulling your critical-thinking skills. And yet, this is how many of us choose to “relax.”

Not very demure, not very mindful, to riff on another phrase from 2024.

But brain rot doesn’t just refer to that guilty, furry-teeth sensation you get from spending too much time on your phone. Brain rot also refers to how being chronically online influences how we talk about certain subjects, how we talk to each other, and how we see ourselves, too.

Brain rot is echo chambers and repeated-from-X talking points.

Brain rot is not being able to distinguish AI slop from a real movie trailer.

Brain rot is rude comment sections filled with judgment and hostility.

Brain rot is what the New Yorker dubbed Instagram Face — the increasingly homogeneous look of women getting plastic surgery and medispa procedures to look more like a filter.

I know all of this. But it’s hard to avoid contributing to my brain geode because, to be honest, I just really love memes. I love short-form comedic content on TikTok and Reels. I love collecting and sharing these things with my friends; “pebbling,” it’s called, according to yet another TikTok trend. Like Gentoo penguins sharing pebbles with prospective mates.

Maybe that’s the escapist part of the scroll. Maybe life feels so significant — so challenging — these days that we need the trivial and unchallenging. Junk food for the brain.

Increasingly, social media terms are making their way offline and into the dictionary; Oxford’s Word of the Year for 2023 was “rizz,” which is short for “charisma.” (It’s worth noting that rizz, like many terms ascribed to social media, actually originated in Black culture.)

“Looking back at the Oxford Word of the Year over the past two decades, you can see society’s growing preoccupation with how our virtual lives are evolving, the way internet culture is permeating so much of who we are and what we talk about,” said Casper Grathwohl, president of Oxford Languages, in the Word of the Year announcement.

That’s true — and one could, in fact, dedicate a whole journalistic beat to defining and decoding these words.

And when we look at some of the other social media neologisms and Words of the Year from the early part of a pandemic-defined decade — Goblin Mode, girl dinner, treat brain, bed rotting (note that’s the second appearance of ‘rot’), and, more recently, brat — there’s an air of rebellion about them.

If the 2010s were defined by girlboss striving and hustle culture, the 2020s have been defined by our collective exhaustion.

A global pandemic, an unstable political climate, an uncertain climate future — all of these things sap our energy and our capacity. I see why people are saying, let’s be brat. Let’s go goblin mode. Let’s rot.

Unfortunately, you know what else saps energy and capacity? The things that contribute to brain rot.

So, we should probably get off our devices once in a while. Go read (or listen to) a book. Go see a friend. Go for a walk. Go clear the caches of our brains.

Or, as someone online might put it, “go touch grass.”

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com