A limited grasp of the English language is not, I think you will agree, the ideal situation for a blogger. I have never hidden my difficulties, for example, in distinguishing between the terms verb and adjective (other terms like adverb, noun, pronouns and numerous other terms that I don’t understand are available). At school, as with just about everything else, what teachers taught me went in one ear and out of the other, leaving me, you might feel, rightly, hopelessly ill-equipped to navigate the real world, but somehow I muddled and bluffed my way through. Rising above my inadequacies is a deep love of words and now I have found another word: brain rot.
Brain rot is the Oxford Free press, so the Oxford Dictionary, word of the year, meaning “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”. I think I understand that, despite the brain rot I am clearly suffering from, but even now I am struggling to get my head around the term brain rot being one word. I would have thought it was two words, but look; I am hardly in an intellectual position to quarrel with the boffins of the Oxford Free Press. Just wait until you read what Casper Grathwohl, Oxford Languages president, says:
“Brain rot speaks to one of the perceived dangers of virtual life, and how we are using our free time. It feels like a rightful next chapter in the cultural conversation about humanity and technology. It’s not surprising that so many voters embraced the term, endorsing it as our choice this year.
“I also find it fascinating that the word brain rot has been adopted by gen Z and gen Alpha, those communities largely responsible for the use and creation of the digital content the term refers to.”
Well, quite, and like many folk, I do spend too much time, particularly when I am on my portable telephone (or cell phone as our American cousins call it), scrolling brainlessly through social media, essentially trying to find something to be interested in. Not as much as I used to, now that twitter has become Elon Musk’s poisonous shitpit called X and that Facebook is little more than a home for middle-aged exhibitionists taking selfies telling us how great their lives are, but probably still too much. But wasn’t it always like this before the internet came along?
You can certainly make a fair and legitimate point by saying that we are only here once by the accident of our birth, overcoming massive odds to be born in the first place. We are on this rock spinning through space which can support some form of life on some of its surfaces and in its oceans, of which 99% of all species that ever existed – around five billion – are now extinct and here we are scrolling through Facebook, connecting with people we don’t really know and in some instances have never met. Yet it’s not just social media.
How about watching TV or going to the pub? Is that better for us than gazing at social media? At the end of the working day, we slump in front of the crystal bucket, switch off at least part of our brains and consume. Arguably, it requires even less brain work than seeing what’s happening on Bluesky, my new social media outlet of choice. Isn’t that a form of brain rot, too?
You could say I am wasting my remaining brain cells and many hours of my life blogging, given that hardly anyone reads it. I am not going to argue with that. My written brain rot maybe brain rot for my loyal reader. Why aren’t you doing something else? What, like work?
As the national retirement age increases every few years, it is likely that the next generations may be working well into their seventies. For many of us, work is something you have to do, not choose to do. Even if you enjoy your work – and I know many of you do – the simple fact is that you are working through the best years of your life, just like you could be scrolling through social media during the best years of your life. But does it really matter?
You could make an argument for just about any aspect of our modern lives being brain rot. Reading a book, going for a run, going on holiday, going shopping when you can do it on-line – why not? I don’t see how scrolling through social media and finding something very interesting to read can be described as brain rot. I came across an excellent piece on AI yesterday while scrolling through Bluesky. I now know far more than I did before about AI. Isn’t that the opposite of brain rot?
Given that I love words, I am hardly going to complain when new words come along. That’s evolution for you. Nothing much stands still and our language includes numerous words and terms that we didn’t use until relatively recently. Brain rot is probably a welcome addition to our vocabulary, to be used as and when we see fit. I am not entirely convinced that the “endless scrolling of mind-numbing content” is exclusive to the internet in general and social media in particular. I would describe “I’m A Celebrity”, ‘Tipping Point” and ‘This Morning” as mind-numbing, but only on a good day. Usually it’s worse than that.
Anyway, when I look around our world and see the mess previous generations have left it in, led by the likes of Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and soon Donald Trump, I fear that brain rot may be more advanced than we first feared. Brain rot is often a welcome escape from the modern world.
