Brain rot. Sure, you laugh. But if brain rot was not a real thing, then why did Oxford University Press choose it as their word of the year? What is brain rot, you ask? Well, if you have to ask, then you know you’ve got it.
Reddit contributor, identified only as “Sayakai” who presumably doesn’t have it, writes, “Brain rot is the idea that exposure to certai (media) content can turn you into an idiot. … Someone who’s really excited about some franchise they discovered and it’s kind of taking over their life for a while, has brain rot.”
Camilla Foster, lifestyle reporter for PA Media describes the mind-numbing fog of brain rot:
“If you feel lethargic after mindlessly scrolling through TikTok in bed, you have probably experienced brain rot.” (Sound familiar?) Oxford Press defines brain rot as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of materials (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.” According to Oxford
Press, incidents of the term have increased 230% in the past year. As diseases, go, brain rot is a pandemic.
Although brain rot has become trendy, the term was actually invented many years ago by Henry David Thoreau, sometimes referred to as an “influential philosopher”, famous for his 1854 book Walden, documenting his retreat to a cabin in the woods, where he got back to basics. Thoreau cautioned against intellectual oversimplification.
“Why level downward,” he asks, “to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense?” He goes on, “While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?”
Although Thoreau is known for his simple lifestyle, subsisting on a vegetarian diet, he once killed and ate a woodchuck that was plundering his beans. Speaking as a long-suffering victim of woodchucks living under my house, I applaud Thoreau. He’s not only a great philosopher, he’s The Man!
Brain rot is not only a disease, it’s a lifestyle, complete with its own vocabulary. Elevated (if that’s the right word) by the sub-verbal internet show “Skibidi Toilet” in which a man sticks his head out of a toilet as he is pursued by people with cameras for heads, brain rot speaks in its own language to Gen Z members. “Rizz”, last year’s Oxford word of the year, is short for charisma and refers to a person’s style and mojo. “Sigma” is a cunning, rebellious loner. “Glazing” is the act of heaping excessive praise on somebody. “Ohio” is a name for the weirdest place on Earth, a synonym for the bizarre and insane. (J.D. Vance is from Ohio.)
There is a reason Australia has now banned social media for everybody under the age of 16.
Brain rot is real. America’s next Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon once helped to run a fake wrestling organization, World Wrestling Entertainment, in which participants hit each other withmetal folding chairs. Our next Health and Human Services Secretary will be RFJ Jr., the anti-science Brain Worm Guy who eats roadkill. And on and on.
In the movie The Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy is transported by a tornado into the magical world of Oz, she says to her dog, “Toto, I’ve got a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”
No, we’re in Ohio.