Have you ever felt like your brain is overflowing? That there’s so much information, so many opinions, and endless stimuli racing through your mind that it all just… freezes? Welcome to the Brain Rot era.
It’s what happens when you spend hours scrolling on social media like TikTok, endlessly binge-watching YouTube, or constantly being flooded with news and notifications. And because so many people are experiencing it, “Brain Rot” has been named the Oxford Word of the Year 2024 (Oxford English Dictionairy) Ironically, the term itself became popular thanks to the internet.
The symptoms of Brain Rot
One of the most noticeable symptoms is a short attention span or reduced concentration. It’s the feeling of your brain being “full,” but without truly productive thoughts. That said, the term isn’t always doom and gloom. Sometimes “Brain Rot” is used humorously, like when someone says, “I’m getting brain rot from this stupid show!” This usually means they’ve watched or done something mindless and feel like it didn’t exactly sharpen their intellect.
It’s that strange mix of digital overload and mental chaos that seems to define our lives today. The idea for this concept came from my own observations of the world around me, and I’ve tried to capture it in an illustration.
The Illustration: Welcome to the Brain Rot era
This idea came to me as I reflected on the overwhelming digital stimuli in our daily lives. It feels like we’re learning more but understanding less.
The illustration depicts a head that’s actually a recycling bin, with a goldfish swimming in the middle. A classic representation of a short attention span or low concentration. After all, who hasn’t heard the saying, “You have the attention span of a goldfish”?
Surrounding this central image are familiar emojis, which we often use to express our emotions. You’ll also see the iconic heart icons (likes) and the word “MEME.”
A meme is an image, often with text, shared widely across the internet, gaining traction as it’s reposted by others. Memes are designed to convey a message and be humorous, but to find them funny, you often need to understand the online culture they come from. Otherwise, they might not mean much to you.
According to the Newport Institute, a U.S.-based mental health organization, a common behavior associated with Brain Rot is doomscrolling: the excessive consumption of negative and alarming online news. In the illustration, a phone is shown constantly bombarding the person with distressing thoughts and unsettling content. The recycling bin attempts to convert this into memes. Whether it succeeds is debatable, given the short attention span.
Doomscrolling often happens late at night in the privacy of our bedrooms. That’s why the illustration shows the clock at 3 a.m., bathed in dramatic, dim nighttime lighting.
In essence, “Brain Rot” is a colorful metaphor to describe how our brains sometimes become overloaded, numbed, or exhausted by our habits and environment.
Now I’m curious: how do you experience the Brain Rot era? Have you ever felt like your brain is overwhelmed by all the stimuli and information around you? Or do you see something entirely different in my illustration? Share your interpretation via my contactformulier, my Instagram, or even TikTok if you dare. Let me know how you find balance in a world that never stops—I’d love to hear your perspective!
