I know. Fifty-six. Middle-(r)aged, mildly feral, proudly grumpy. The checklist is complete: patience shrinking, waistline expanding, hair turning silver, temper on a hair trigger, and that smug déjà-vu that whispers I’ve seen this mess before…again.
Like an old sports car, I still redline fast. A well-fed ego the size of a small hill. From that comfortable height I watch the daily parade of common mortals and wonder how evolution waved that plethora of gremlins through quality control. Today I am parking the ego and picking up a scalpel. Target on the slab: brain rot. The Oxford crowd crowned it Word of the Year 2024 and defines it 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.” Let me translate that in Danny speak: it’s the slow smelly leak of thinking when you soak your cortex in lobotomizing junk, the low-effort toxic sludge spilling from the toilet drains of your feeds. Word of the year, no less. Usage spiked, the public voted, lexicographers nodded, headlines were printed… and we kept scrolling, proudly naming the disease while double-licking the noxious screen.
Brain Rot. It ricochets around my aging head like a euro coin in a dryer. Ofcom, the independent regulator and competition authority for the UK’s communications industries, investigated Brain Rot for kids for a year and came back with a line that still makes my jaw tighten: “brain rot” is a genre. Rapid-cut, loud, contextless brain killing clips that leave them pumped and empty at the same time. Overstimulated and under-informed. Buzzing with energy and depressed as hell. Some felt dizzy, grumpy, unable to watch a film through without grabbing the phone for another hit. Most report withdrawal syndromes after mere minutes without access to their platforms. If the KGB, MI6, Mossad or the CIA would do this, we’d call it what it is: soul crushing. Brainwashing. Cognitive strip-mining. Mass-numbing.
Teenagers fold headfirst like a brick because the game targets them with surgical precision. Identity still wobbly, sleep in shreds, hormones on turbo, dopamine on a drip. Neuroscience’s little joke: the prefrontal cortex, the bit that handles brakes, planning and “maybe don’t,” is still installing essential firmware well into the twenties while the limbic system runs on nitro. Perfect for swiping, terrible for nuance. Yet they stroll around cocky, without any bullshit-bulletproof shield, but convinced they can spot manipulation (by the MSM, you know) at 200 meters, right before the social algorithm picks their mental wellbeing pocket. The feed hands them pre-chewed opinions with a deadly soundtrack and a sexy mascot. They repeat the lines, collect the likes, call it a stance, and when you try to pull them out you meet Walking Dead withdrawal symptoms dressed up as personality.
Young adults show up with irony and swagger. They know it’s trash, but it’s “our” trash. Nuance. Keep it down, boomer. Meme fluency turns into currency. YouTube tutorials outrank logic. Debates shrink into silly quick-paced micro-clips that fit between two tram stops. Musk quotes pass for thought experiments. Trump soundbites substitute for history. Zuck’s engagement weather rolls in every hour. TikTok barons pour shots and everyone swears they are only here for one drink, and to enjoy the scenery. Change the baby’s diaper, learn “what happened in the world” in the comment session under Dua Lipa’s hip thrust, call it “staying informed”. “Do your own research” is rebadged as science, books are a nuisance, and influencers play king, pope and queen.
Midlifers crash in after work, between meetings, padel, therapy, Tinder, and frantic calls with their exes. Exhausted and primed. They call it relaxation. Sourcing. Healing. Ten minutes of no-time swells into two hours of IQ-killing brain-chopping. The system learns their grudges, warms them up, and serves a tasting menu of outrage, certainty, and that soothing hum of familiar comprehension. Conspiracies arrive like comfort food. Biases get massaged, then embalmed. Curiosity gives way to ritual. Ritual hardens into reinforcement. Logic and contrarian thinking go into the ice blender with an overripe avocado and a sex-on-the-beach quick martini. Cheers to cognitive mulch.
Old hands, the supposed adults in the room, aren’t immune. On the contrary. Blissfully unaware and dangerously certain. In their heads the past was golden, their judgment is gold-plated, and everyone else should take notes. They forward chain-poison in the family chat with bone-grinding stamina. They trust familiar faces, which in platform language means “recommended often enough to feel cosy.” They baptise that cosy feeling as credibility. Experience, even. They watch smooth talkers playing reporter and decide studio lights equal proof. Short fuses ignite like a match over onion-soup vapours. Outrage ages like supermarket wine. The hangover stays brand new.
Across ages the sloshy brew is the same. Cheap slogans from empty influencers. Media t(r)icks in labcoats dressed up as neuroscience. Schools stuck in analog rules while the world runs on digital attention engines. Journalists chasing celebrity arcs instead of filing the work, craving their Tucker moment. Billionaires tooling platforms into creepy weapons of intellectual mass distraction… and destruction. Most of us, chewing and swallowing untruths, biases, conspiracies and dumbfoolery faster than Bonnie Blue finished off a thousand suitors.
Now fold this into the bigger piece.
Brain rot is a cultural diagnosis that we keep confirming with our thumbs. The dictionary definition nails the vibe. The fieldwork with children nails the mechanism. TikTok metrics show a tag humming at industrial scale. Genre meets machine. Machine meets childhood. Childhood meets mental checkout. Adults play braindead like it’s football and call it Tuesday.
Meanwhile, a whole economy thrives on turning attention into glue traps. Influencers distribute slogans like party flyers. Media barons sharpen platforms into weapons. Grifters chant “do your own research” then hand you a shovel and point at a swamp. Schools still pretend social media is a phase. Parenting outsources discipline to screen-time dashboards. Journalism dreams of prime-time gladiator matches. Venture-backed “neuro” hacks boil down to loud noises and borrowed dopamine. Every week another meme wave bleeds into politics, laundering fringe nonsense with a wink and a beat drop. The algorithm hauls it farther than any family-dinner rant ever could. Pink-packaged, smile-stickered, socially accepted pestilence.
The worst part isn’t that the clips are dumb. The worst part is that we are forgetting the very moves that keep civilization running, thriving, resisting, growing. Curiosity that bites. Skepticism with manners. Cold statistics that knock nonsense off the table. Context that refuses to be cropped in 10 seconds. I keep telling Tara, nine and already a scientist at heart, that attention is a superpower, that contrarian questions are way more powerful than a lightsaber (she’s growing up in a Star Wars home, what can I say). But questions take work, and work is out of fashion. Meme fireworks sell faster than daylight. Conspiracy candy melts on the tongue. Flat-earthery comes with stickers. Point this out and people stare like I just confessed to licking Tesla batteries for fun.
We’re raising two generations fluent in cuts, filters, and punchlines, and illiterate in causality. Correlation is not causation. Logic 101. Occam’s razor, where did you wander off to? If you can’t follow a claim across three paragraphs, you can’t vote with intent. If you can’t hold two ideas in your head without melting them into gibberish, you will end up cheering for your own cage. If your news diet loops déjà-vu shocks on repeat, familiarity will dress up as truth.
That is how flat worlds, lizard parliaments and miracle tinctures keep crawling out of the landfill. We didn’t only lose the plot, the high ground and the logic. We signed the transfer papers. Outsourced, filed, fucked, forgotten.
I am not preaching a digital monastery. I am asking for basic hygiene. Teach logic before laptops. Teach attention as a scarce resource. Teach that a statistic without a denominator is a dirty party trick. Teach that a source is not a vibe. If you run a newsroom, stop chasing the next gladiator and do the work. If you run a platform, stop turning adolescents into A B tests. If you sell “neuroscience” in a neon font, refund the century.
We already teach safe sex because pleasure without protection is risky and deadly. Do the same for minds. Helmets for heads. Seatbelts for feeds. Condoms for cognition. Build the mental immune system before the next pathogen of nonsense blows through.
At home, fix the rituals. Slow dinner. Long books. Boredom without a rescue mission. Phones sleeping outside the bedroom. A parent who can say no without a TED talk. A teacher who can say close the tab and mean it. The cliffs ahead are not hidden. We can stop rewarding the circus, rewire classrooms for real media literacy, pay journalists to investigate instead of performing, and drag political discourse out of the meme grinder.
Or we can keep doom-yapping while the floor slips. I already picked my side: Say no to nonsense.
