Oxford English Dictionary has chosen brain rot as the 2024 word of the year. The word was picked for its relevance in society and its increased frequency of use, up 230% from last year. OED defines brain rot as “(n.) Supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as a 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.”
Now more than ever our attention has become commoditized. We consume news, entertainment, and social media on platforms that feed from our hits, likes, and engagement. If we are not paying for a service, we are the product: these outlets trade in their users’ engagement. It seems magical at this point how we can merely think about an item and then suddenly the advertisements on the webpages we visit are prompting us to buy. Students consider AI as a shortcut to exercising thinking work. Society is increasingly designed to allow us to passively consume. Yet this is not a new phenomenon. That it is easy to be passive, apathetic, consuming, lazy, and allow our responsibility to be usurped can be observed throughout history.
And we are rather content to allow our brains to rot because of how easy it is to be apathetic and how difficult it is to be human. We have a few ontological traits, chief among them are a striving for meaning, the potential to be rational, an awareness of our limitations, and the agency of choice. Already this concoction can be a recipe for experiencing overwhelmingness, powerlessness, meaninglessness, alienation. Our thoughts contradict our emotions, our emotions conflict with our actions, our actions fall short of making cohesion out of who we want to be. The tendency to escape the anxiety this causes is a natural result of the burden of existing as a creature capable of reason.
But a habit to escape responsibility or pain need not be intrinsic to our being. If we think of the ease and comfort to be apathetic and passive as circumstantial, we need not define ourself by the temptation. Meaning seeking, rational potential, limitations, and choices are ontological, while the resulting potential anxiety and temptation to be passive can be merely a mood of a moment. The tendency is something to indulge or fight against. It takes effort, drive, and assumption of our own agency. We have moments of creation, where we nurture, write, build. We have moments where we confront ourself. We can train ourself in maturity to use our reward and punishment physiological functions to game our tendencies to work for our goals. Most of all, we can be intentional to make conscious review, intent, and goals as to who we want to be, what our purpose is, and how we want to live accordingly.
To be human is to wrestle with the tension of being human. Thoughts and desires, emotions and appetites, ease and effort, apathy and action. This very tension is not ugly, even if it is difficult to navigate, but enriches our existence if we allow ourself power. We make decisions in each moment that mold who we are. The journey is rarely linear, as being human includes struggle, doubt, turns, progress and regress, stagnation and growth, and death.
Doom Scrolling Through Life
Doom scrolling describes the mindless passive consumption mode entered when technology at the fingertips becomes addictive and endless. The connectivity of the internet and particularly social media allow bottomless feeding of content from contacts, companies, advertisers, and filler. The point is to lose the self, to take a ment…
Essence of Humanity
Recently I read Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. The main character Grenouille is born and lives without a bodily smell, without a sense of morality, with an extremely heightened sense of smell, and without a moral judgment of various smells. The author compels the reader into this universe where smell is the es…
Pursuing a Philosophical Life: Practical Habits
What is essential to pursuing a philosophical life? This article will likely not stay stagnant, but evolve as ideas are formed and new activities are identified. These ideas are rather from a data point of one, from the subjective and biased perspective of the author who has been developing how to live her own philosophical lif…
interesting. I struggle with this sentence "We can train ourself in maturity to use our reward and punishment physiological functions to game our tendencies to work for our goals." I think there are too many concepts added without further examining one particular problem. A the end of the day you seem to push us to make more effort to think for ourselves. But what is the consequence of not doing so ? what do you fight for and why should we follow you ?