I can pin the very moment I first realized I was “doomscrolling.” It was March 2020, a turning point in many of our young lives, and one where the only path forward I saw was ignoring the state of the world outside my room. The doom lay in the fact that I did not think there was a world left—devastating world news led me to panic about whether I would see my friends again or even walk across the stage at graduation.
Social media, particularly TikTok, took over my life in a capacity I couldn’t consider a reality, even now. My screen time would often present itself as a glaring reminder that I had not left the house in days. I would hardly even leave my room to eat. Short-form videos silenced my thoughts, easing my boredom while disillusioning myself from my real anxieties about the state of the world.
The evolution of the short-form video after dominating a COVID-19 era has propped up a term that is immeasurably aware of itself: “brainrot.” Brainrot is a phenomenon in and of itself, defined by its meaninglessness. “Mama, a girl behind you.” A purple heart emoji. The infamous “six, seven.” These phenomena stretch across Instagram Reels, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts, and their virality is exacerbated by their short, overstimulating, and completely nonsensical nature. It’s a constantly refreshing stream, one that continues to flow with content that few would call admirable to consume. Brainrot has become the target of this very question: Why are we connected by these seemingly meaningless cultural artifacts? What is the connection between brainrot culture, the short form video, and the sense of community it fosters?
My understanding is that we are simply overwhelmed. The rise of these jokes are not evidence of Gen Z’s laziness or addiction to the internet but rather a symptom of being intellectually exhausted human beings. We can read an article about a catastrophe overseas on the same device that we use to check the time, and reading your texts means you have to be prepared to dodge a series of notifications detailing political despondency. The same overwhelmedness that led me to a quintessential Tiktok addiction is now ruling over young people, because we do not know how to save ourselves from consuming the rush of information at this unprecedented scale. Everything we take in, read, and discuss online bears meaning that has effects on our mental health, ones impossible to fully grasp. We carry the weight of the world in our pockets, and without realizing, our brains cannot emotionally regulate this weight nor accept it.
It’s no wonder that the most viral forms of online content, regularly coming out of Tiktok and Reels, are bits and pieces of meaninglessness that make us laugh. We are drawn to brainrot because it’s a release. It arguably takes no intellectual capability to get in on the joke at a time when we live our lives struggling to parse out meaning in all the world’s most prominent happenings.
But is brainrot truly harming our society as a whole? Are the consequences explicitly negative, or is it simply a brand-new cultural medium? In terms of the product itself, I do not believe there is something inherently bad about consuming meaningless content on the internet. That being said, in order to initiate any kind of cultural or societal discourse about how we consume content or whether or not our habits are harmful, brainrot cannot be defined with the binary of “good” or “bad.” We need to reframe how we understand the act of excessive media consumption and ask ourselves why we are laughing so hard at videos of nothing. The guilt we feel as a result of the infamous doomscroll is misplaced. Our constant usage is not an indicator of our day-to-day priorities but rather a personal reflection about the overwhelmingness of being online in the first place.
I recall my aunt sticking up for a cousin of mine after other family members complained about her phone use: “If my mother took away my radio, I would’ve gone insane.” Every generation has had novel forms of media that define their upbringings, and the fact that ours is named with the words “rot” and “doom” only says something about the state of the world, not the generation native to it.
Artwork by Caroline Choi