It's the Brain Rot
This is the year of Donald Trump (again). The year of the “hawk tuah” girl. The year of Skibiti Toilet.
Brain rot. The word of the year is brain rot. Honestly, it makes perfect sense.
This is the year of Donald Trump (again). The year of the “hawk tuah” girl. The year of Skibiti Toilet.
Our brains — they have rotted.
I didn’t expect to find out the term was coined in 1854 by Henry David Thoreau in Walden. It was nice of Oxford University Press to throw us that tidbit, letting us know we aren’t the first to let our mental or intellectual states deteriorate from over-consumption of bad media. We’re just continuing the tradition.
The first recorded use of ‘brain rot’ was found in 1854 in Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden, which reports his experiences of living a simple lifestyle in the natural world. As part of his conclusions, Thoreau criticizes society’s tendency to devalue complex ideas, or those that can be interpreted in multiple ways, in favour of simple ones, and sees this as indicative of a general decline in mental and intellectual effort: “While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot – which prevails so much more widely and fatally?”
Things that have contributed to my own brain rot this year include:
the Real Housewives franchise
the Below Deck franchise
social media
my iPhone in general
I’m going to give myself credit for being self-aware, and bonus points for knowing I’m probably not going to improve those habits anytime soon. The fabricated drama on Real Housewives and Below Deck is too good to give up.
“Receipts! Proof! Timeline! Screenshots! F*cking everything!” – Heather Gay, RHOSLC