If you grew up in the 2000s chances are you have heard adults around you say things like “Video games are going to rot your brain” or “That screen is turning your head to mush”. At the time, those comments were disregarded with faint acknowledgment and little thought. But now, years later ‘Brain Rot’ is a trend.
“There are 5.35 billion internet users worldwide,” Forbes reports in their article following 2024 internet statistics. Knowing this when you take the worldwide screen time average of 6 hours and 40 minutes per day, you learn that collectively we spend over 4 million years online every single day.
While some of your daily screen time could be for work, the internet is a place that has ample opportunity to cultivate productivity, truthfully; the larger part of those million years will be spent on forgettable useless content.
‘Brain Rot’ refers to low-quality, psychologically numbing content that is found all over social media today. Manifesting in ways such as memes, trends, and videos, but, more broadly the fatigue from the short-term vacuous stimulation of the digital world. Overall it summarizes the concept of somebody who is ‘chronically online’. As Michael Naness in The Colgate Maroon News puts it, “It is, in essence, the idea that constant exposure to certain content via the internet can turn someone into an idiot.”
Where does Gen Alpha fit into all of this? Gen Alpha is the generation after Gen Z and includes people born between 2010 – 2024. It seems to be agreed upon across the internet that Gen Alpha is the one who brought forth all of this. Attributing all of ‘Brain Rot’ contents and effects to Gen Alphas’ growing digital precedence is equivocal, but it seems to be a general perception.
Most of the association between Gen Alpha and ‘Brain Rot’ comes from their slang being memes associated with ‘Brain Rot’, terms such as skibidi, gyatt, and rizz. They are only brought to the center of the conversation surrounding this because they are the ones who have been completely exposed to this dramatic digital landscape since birth. Instead of the older generations who know better having critical thought and attention span being broken down by ‘Brain Rot’, Gen Alpha’s whole cognitive thinking is being made up of it. They don’t know better.
Over the past 15 years, our attention spans have been getting shorter and shorter. According to The North Easter, “Computer scientists and psychologists have been studying attention spans for about 20 years, over which time the average time that a person can focus on one thing has dropped from around 2½ minutes to around 45 seconds.”
When things are simple, digestible, and quick there is no need for any further thought, just scroll to the next post and repeat. Things like this weaken the ability to focus in the real world where daily occurrences might be more difficult, complex, and uncomfortable. ‘Brain Rot’ comes into play in this conversation as the long-term effects.
All this being said, bring it back to yourself. It is not hard to figure out how much time you are spending consuming unproductive content. Think about where else your time could be spent, how much of an expert would you be if you spent the same time you do TikTok on learning the piano? Overall it is important to hold on to your critical thought and do something for yourself that is stimulating outside of your phone.
