Brainrot
By JILLIAN CHENG ‘27
Our generation is cooked. This brainrot era is not giving brat but more so skibidi toilet rizz only in Ohio. And those two sentences are enough to summarize the entirety of this article. In the past decade, social media platforms have pared down their content into shorter videos to fit even shorter attention spans. Additionally, as AI begins integrating into these social media platforms and mainstream technology products, what comes out on the other side is a true dystopian abomination fueled by the wild imagination of younger generation. But, first of all, how did children pastimes go from playing outside to watching videos of human-headed toilets? Why do teens speak in bewildering jargon to each other and how do almost all of them understand? The answer lies in TikTok.
TikTok is a social media platform that first popularized 15-30 second video clips as content forms. As of 2024, TikTok has 150 million active users in the United States, 25% of which are teenagers. Day after day, it’s so easy to press on that little music note and drown out the rest of the world, doomscrolling through hundreds of mind numbing videos. It’s almost impossible not to encounter brain rot.
So, what is brain rot? It can be a noun or adjective, all describing how social media is rotting your mind. Basically, it means you’re chronically online, or the nonsensical words you’re spouting are from the depths of the internet. You might have an issue if you use the following on the daily: pookie, gyatt, sigma, edge, skibidi. Or, maybe you’re referencing full sentences from videos that rack up millions of likes. But before TikTok brain rot, there was Vine.
The first fossils of brain rot are found from 2012: the start of the first short video platform Vine. Vine, similar to TikTok, produced memeable short videos that people could reference outside of the internet world, but with quick lighthearted and literal jokes that actually made sense the first time you watched the video. I generally reminisce about Vine’s lightheartedness, think to myself, wow, I wish TikTok brain rot would be funny like Vine was. But despite how disorienting brain rot is in the modern day, it still has personality like Vines did. Brain rot is not intentionally created by workers at a corporation sitting behind desks. They are from the people, for both themselves and for the people. As TikTok has a limited time to capture your attention, users trying to win the algorithm over must also shorten their comedy, resorting to overwhelming you with confusion to keep you hooked. The vast internet provides hundreds of niche videos filled with these confusing jokes, and as us TikTok users continue to scroll, we slowly learn all of them. Brain rot makes us feel like we’re part of a community. Even off our phones, we slip in brain rotted phrases in conversation, an inside joke shared among the internet community.
But while brain rot unites a community, it can also tear a community down. The average teenager spends about 8½ hours on their screens. With a whole generation of teenagers glued to their phones, spouting nonsensical combinations of words to each other, how can we expect brain rot to remain harmless? Spoiler: it’s not. Our brains are literally decaying with every TikTok doom scroll session.
Boston Children’s hospital calls brain rot a syndrome: PIMU—Problematic Interactive Media Use. PIMU describes when devices interfere with a person’s every day functions, like sleep, social withdrawal, and even deteriorating mental health. Sound familiar?
Unfortunately, there is no prescribed antibiotic for PIMU, but there is a cure. Go outside. Touch some grass. Your phone does not control you as you hold it in your hand. TikTok, Instagram Reels, and Youtube Shorts are dopamine hits that will always be there, but you only have Exeter for four years. So stay present. Eat out with your friends, have fulfilling conversations, and maybe consider setting a screen time. After reading this, do me a favor, and put your phone down.