Why 2024 Was the Year of ‘Brain Rot’

It was exhausting being online over the past few years.

And over the past year, it feels like things have hit a boiling point.

I work as a senior editor at an online LGBTQ2S+ magazine. As someone with a very online job that demands I keep up with the news cycle, the onslaught of heaviness in 2024 has massively increased my desire — or, frankly, need — for counter-programming wherever possible.

Nearly every night for the past year, I’ve done what my partner calls my “onlines.” While she nobly reads a book — her brain strong and more ridged than mine — I plug my headphones into my smooth brain for one to two hours of nightly TikTok content.

My hand cramps from propping my phone up on my chest, swiping and swiping and swiping until I finally turn it off and spend another hour of blue-light-fuelled sleep avoidance thinking about all the cat videos and recipes and memes I just absorbed in a dissociative state.

Sound familiar? I’m certainly not alone in my thirst for mind-numbing dissociation amidst a strenuous news cycle. And it turns out there’s a word for all of that.

Earlier this month, the Oxford English Dictionary declared “brain rot” as its word of the year, an annual accolade that doesn’t mean all that much beyond capturing the mood of a populace at a certain time in history.

And this year, right now? That mood is tired.

‘The argot of a generation’

The Oxford English Dictionary specifically defines brain rot 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. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration.”

The New Yorker’s Jessica Winter called it “a strikingly capacious term, enfolding the psychological and cognitive decay wrought by screen addiction, the bacteria-like content that feeds the addiction, and the argot of a generation for whom much of this content is made.”

And there’s science to back it all up: a group of psychologists at Stanford University concluded back in 2018 that people who frequently multi-task with multiple online platforms — say, scrolling TikTok on my phone while checking emails on my laptop while watching Below Deck on the TV — have reduced our memory and attention spans.

Brain rot is both the symptom and the solution to a need to escape from the darkness of the real world.

During an appearance on CBC’s Commotion podcast earlier this month, I partook in a game of “brain rot or not?” where host Elamin Abdelmahmoud presented me and other panellists with a variety of sounds, ranging from the “Subway Surfers” music to the scrumptiously satisfying crunch of one of those big hydraulic presses crushing something.

To add to those examples: that elderly Persian cat named Gizmo I follow on TikTok? He both gives me, and is in and of himself, brain rot.

Same goes for the dozen seasons of Top Chef I’ve watched since the U.S. presidential election.

Even my partner, pious in her nightly library reading, indulges in her own flavour of brain rot through her obsession with “panning” content — a genre of Instagram influencer girlie who posts obsessively over “hitting pan” (also known as the act of finishing a skin care, makeup or personal product — you know, when you hit that bottom of your eyeshadow palette). I once asked why she cares so much about it. “I just like it” was her answer.

And while I can’t blame it entirely on my nightly content dump, I do feel... slower than I did a year ago. And my nightly habits might even be shortening my lifespan, as one 2023 study suggests.

Aspirationally, I’d love to spend my time reading important works, learning new things, crafting or creating stuff.

And yet, like clockwork, there I am every night with my screen and my scrolling.

Internet garbage is hardly a new phenomenon. But there’s something behind the Oxford English Dictionary choosing this word now, to capture the place we are at now.

Has being online become more isolating?

As 2024 comes to a close, we’re in the midst of a great social media shift. The re-election of Donald Trump has quickly degraded the social media platform X, long a networking and news gathering space for millions of people, into a much darker place (a process already started by Elon Musk’s acquisition of the platform last year).

Meta, meanwhile, has banned Canadian news from Facebook and Instagram.

Even TikTok has seen a partial ban in the United States, further fracturing our online gathering spaces.

In many ways, being online has become more isolated, even as we seek out alternatives. My thriving community on X hasn’t all made its way over to Bluesky like I have, and I’ve lost people who’ve been my mutuals for years.

At 29, I am of a cohort that came of age along with the internet. I was on the Neopets text-based role-playing forums in middle school. I wrote Twilight fan fiction in high school. I had a very successful fan Tumblr blog devoted to the Canadian sci-fi TV series Orphan Black when I was in university. And I’ve relied on networking platforms like the website formerly known as Twitter to advance my career since graduating.

I’ve seen many people over 30 balk at the idea that something like “skibidi toilet” would go viral in 2024, but it doesn’t feel all that different from “Charlie the Unicorn,” a staple of 2005 middle-school internet.

The idea that internet garbage as brain rot is a new phenomenon in 2024 is small-minded at best.

But the platforms where we consume it, and the world around us, make it a decidedly different beast this year of all years — even compared with some obviously challenging recent periods.

Take 2020, a year where, by health protocol necessity, our existences became moved even further online.

Much of that year was experienced through a screen for many of us, and we took solace in much of the content that falls under the “brain rot” designation. I played a lot of Animal Crossing: New Horizons and watched a lot of bad reality TV in those dark pandemic months.

But the difference back then was that we were all in it together. In 2020, I actually found myself connecting even more with friends in other cities, as we visited each other’s Animal Crossing islands.

My now-fiancée, who was a friend at the time, and I connected over Zoom, before gradually meeting six feet apart in New Brighton Park for pandemic-era dates.

Collective games like Among Us and Jackbox surged in popularity, as friends worked to stay in better connection.

Maybe I look back with a degree of rose-coloured hindsight, but being online in 2020 didn’t feel rotted in the way 2024 has felt rotted. It felt nourishing and growing and life-sustaining during a really hard time.

But this year, I both dread and long for every moment I open my phone — a feeling I attribute to both the news I know I’ll see, and the content sludge I’ll consume to get through it.

In all honesty, my favourite online space in 2024 wasn’t in my nightly content dump from these big social media networks, but the small Discord server my partner and I made with some friends last year to share memes and recipes and make movie night plans together. Just two dozen of my real-life connections, coming together in a shared online space. No strangers. No Nazis. No egotistical billionaires.

It reminds me of that collective deep pandemic feeling, where the internet is an avenue to build and strengthen connections, rather than create rifts and rot.

Call it 2024’s version of an Animal Crossing island. I think that in order to fight the continued rot, we need to find more of those spaces where we can. Places where we can talk amongst ourselves and really reconnect with the “network” side of social networking again.

The endless scroll of brain rot might feel good in the short term, and I’m not suggesting we all quit cold turkey. But find those spaces with real humans to talk about the rot you love, rather than rotting alone. Take those memes to the group chat; make a channel to talk about the latest episode of Doctor Odyssey.

Let’s find ways to rot together, because that’s so much better than rotting alone.

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