Chat, what the skibidi? This is NOT Sigma. Bruh ts pmo. I’m actually gonna crash out in 4K HD if one more person Fanum taxes my muk. Whether you’re mewing, looksmaxing, or rizzing Livvy Dunne, you have some type of brain rot in your vocabulary. “Just put the fries in the bag.”I was told when teaching my classmates for our teaching segment in history
“I’m losing my alpha aura.” When losing a tennis match“An eagle cries but a hawk tuahs.”I heard as I was walking to my next class“Vexbolts mass unfollowing December 31st 11:59pm.”Someone yelled off of a chairliftThese are a few of the phrases I’ve heard within the past week duringrandom conversations throughout the classroom and in the halls. With endless scrolling between TikTok and Instagram Reels, the internet has seemingly turned all of our brains into stakeholders for strange vocabulary and rabbit holes for conspiracy theories. Brain rot has taken over the internet, and our youth, especially AHS, even being named the Oxford word-of-the-year. I think it’s safe to say chat, we are cooked.
To the older people in my life, I think you were right, it always was the damn phone. Brain rot is the feeling you get when you spend your entire Sunday switching between TikTok and IG Reels because you keep getting bored of one or the other. Brain rot is when your attention span is so insanely fried that even a 30-second video feels too long. Our brains are constantly overstimulated but also famished, leaving us anxious, restless, and bored. We sit in bed exhausted at night, yet sit on our phones scrolling for the satisfaction (of what?)How on Earth did it get this bad?Well, I view the beginning of our downward slope in the summer of 2019 when VSCO girls were a “trend?” But that was just the beginning. Just a few months after, Covid-19 hit, and it was straight downhill from there. Being cooped up in our homes for months on end was not our key to success. But I mean hey, we survived a disease from which 7 million people died. I’ll definitely be flexing to my grandkids that I survived a global pandemic. “I fought every second to survive,” I’ll say, reminiscing about being voted out for no reason in Among Us.Will our generation make it out okay?Well, probably… not. First of all, I think half of this year’s class will only be graduating due to the convenience of AI, acting like we were pilgrims when it didn’t exist. Second of all, I think the thought of deleting the precious IG Reels sends most of us into a cold sweat. And third of all? Parents are still giving their kids iPads. It’s safe to say it’s endgame.Well, then how DO we make it out okay?Unpopular opinion: I think we need a global digital detox. Sure, it sounds dystopian, but SO BE IT. Send us all to a dystopian world. I think a cleanse of technology for at least 6 months would be a perfect progressive start to a brain rot-free community. And if anyone is heard saying they gyatt something in their eye? Life sentence.
But for now, we will all remain endlessly scrolling, rotting our brains to mush. Well, maybe brain rot is just the new norm. A natural way for the human brain to live in the digital age. Or maybe, one day, our world will finally decide enough is enough. But until then, we should be embracing what we have off of the screen. Log off for a bit, your brain deserves better.