Open Instagram. Check Stories. Reply to DMs. Exit.
Open school email. Check updates. Reply to professors. Exit.
Open TikTok.
“Baby, hold my hand—” Scroll.
“Nothing beats a Jet2 holiday, and now—” Scroll.
“Sydney Sweeney has great—” Scroll.
Another recycled audio. Another “aura-farming” kid on a boat. Another half hour gone. Before class even starts, eight hours of sleep disappear into endless waves of feeds and notifications. Sound familiar?
This creeping fatigue has a name. Oxford defined “brain rot,” its 2024 Word of the Year, 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.”
Nothing captures this cultural phenomenon better than the bizarre, 79-episode-and-counting animated series “Skibidi Toilet,” set in a dystopian world where human-headed toilets blast out unintelligible remixes of 2000s pop music. The online reaction is unparalleled: the first episode gained over 225 million views; the most recent one, 14 million. Thinkhouse, a youth-focused digital publication, attributes its rise to postmodern meme culture. Minion memes followed by a dad joke? Boomer humor. Skibidi gyatt mewing in Ohio? Comedy gold.
At first glance, this slang seems playful and harmless. But I argue otherwise: such vernacular limits our vocabulary, rather than expanding it.
As AveyTV states in the online documentary “How Brain Rot is Rewiring Your Brain,” “…Gen-Z slang… [that] the internet keeps churning out every other week is monotonous, and it is replacing the articulate and thoughtful vocabulary we have built over millennia.”
Sure, it’s fun to embrace the occasional cringe, but integrating it into our daily discourse with little to no caution should be alarming — especially for us students. The revelation that words like “bussin’,” “slay queen” or “lit” won’t earn you an A on your English essay comes easily enough. Yet “brain rot” culture fostered by this empty language diminishes intellectual judgement — the very critical thinking skill we rely on to navigate the rigorous demands of academia.
Research published in Brain Sciences shows that social media works in direct opposition to cognitive processes that help retain and retrieve knowledge. By delivering stimuli in a rapid, sporadic manner, such as likes and comments, social media platforms force us to task-switch, increasing the amount of work our brains are doing. Meanwhile, the constant stream of content, like TikTok or Instagram Reels, leaves little room for deep thinking or meaningful integration of knowledge. The result is a form of cognitive debt: a dopamine-driven feedback loop that prioritizes engagement metrics over users’ mental and cognitive well-being.
This feed overload is the mental equivalent of “junk food.” Eating one bag of Takis once in a while is satisfying, but four bags all at once warrants a trip to diarrhea world. Similarly, excessive exposure to irrelevant content undermines our cognitive functions, produces mental and emotional fatigue, and even impairs our ability to enjoy truly intellectually restorative activities. The digitalization of information has made knowledge accessible to anyone who has a Wi-Fi connection, but it also opens doors for social media companies to capitalize on the most valuable asset of human beings: attention.
Today, public schools have replaced pen and paper with tablets and computers. It begs the question: who is teaching you how to think? Is it your university, your favorite influencer or yourself?