‘Brain rot’ was last year’s Oxford English Dictionary ‘word of the year’ (I mean, technically it’s two words but whatever), referring to the “supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as a result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.”
Basically, it’s what happens when you fall down a TikTok scroll hole – or (my personal poison) spend ten hours straight watching MAFS Australia. Many articles have been written about how consuming so much internet slop and terrible TV is making us kinda dumb, depressed, anxious and possibly even infertile.
But is it true? Well, I’m personally not sure. Given that we’re living in a world where horrible news is pinged into our lives at an alarming rate, I find that things like The Kardashians or Gossip Girl (I’m on my 50th re-run, WBU?) have a lovely soothing quality that I could not live without. The fact is, most things which are written off as ‘brain rot’ content, particularly on TV, are not just entertaining, they’re also an excellent way to decompress.
TikTok in particular gets a lot of flak as being a ‘brain rot’ activity; and don’t get me wrong, I’m sure that if I climbed into bed at night and read one of the many hundreds (I’m only slightly exaggerating here) of books that I keep on my bedside table, instead of scrolling my FYP for 40 minutes, I’d end up feeling very pleased with myself indeed. But honestly, I’ve come to love my TikTok time. It is sacred to me, a time which I’ve made clear to my boyfriend, I am not to be disturbed. There’s just something about being able to park my inner voice, even just for a little while, and consume something completely passively that I’ve come to look forward to.
This whole thing, where new technology is written off as ‘rotting our brains’, is not new. In fact, it goes as far back as ancient Greece – the philosopher Socrates warned against writing because it would “create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories.” In 2010, the neuropsychologist Vaughan Bell looked at many examples of ‘tech scares’, warning that the tendency to find new technologies stressful or annoying was often unrelated to how damaging they were.
My personal theory is that part of the reason this idea – that scrolling is making us all stupid/ sad etc – got so much traction is because of a vibe shift where being offline has become a kind of status symbol. It was the brand strategist Eugene Healy who called IRL the “new status symbol” in a video he made about the post-brain rot era. “2024 saw the luxury industry get deeper into run clubs, book clubs, pop-ups and activations,” he said. “I’m predicting that this is going to drive an attitude that spending more time IRL is seen as a status symbol, which conversely means that being tech addicted will be seen as a low status trait.”
In 2025, being tied to our phones is suddenly becoming kind of uncool. So maybe it’s not that being online is bad for us, so much as the fact that being offline is a kind of flex (so much of a flex that luxury brands want to align themselves with this ‘status symbol’ while the rest of us
Still, I won’t deny that an hour of scrolling will probably leave anyone feeling lethargic and dissatisfied. I try to set myself limits. There’s a reason that saying about “too much of a good thing” exists. I make sure to stick to my designated TikTok time and keep my MAFS Australia consumption to a reasonable amount… well, I will as soon as this season finishes.
