In 2024, “brain rot” was named the Oxford English Dictionary’s Word of the Year – a fitting choice for the award’s 20th anniversary. Much like 2004’s inaugural pick of “chav”, the term says less about the people it targets than it does the anxieties it reflects.
What began as a niche joke about overstimulation has quickly hardened into a cultural shorthand. It’s flung at TikToks, memes, toys, YouTube rabbit holes – anything fast, absurd, or unfamiliar. The term is satisfying because it defines the chaos for those out of the loop: a tidy way to sneer from the sidelines without engaging, to flatten what feels overwhelming into something meaningless.
But in reality, “brain rot” reveals more about the people using it dismissively than it does the ones engaging with and creating it.
Brain Rot as Cultural Gatekeeping
Rather than describing a specific behaviour, the phrase works as an umbrella form of gatekeeping, allowing people to dismiss whatever’s circulating online as shallow or corrosive – a rejection of phenomenon, or a trend, that’s moving too fast, looking too strange, or feeling too trivial. In that sense, “brain rot” isn’t really a diagnosis at all. It’s a way of staying out of the loop without admitting confusion or misunderstanding.
A Gateway to Deeper Topics
What appears to many as a distraction is better understood as selective filtering. In an environment of nonstop digital noise, attention’s no longer passive – it’s an active skill. If something isn’t worth attention, it gets swiped past in seconds. If something is worth the attention, people will commit to a 45-minute video essay, a deep-dive thread, or a meme format that evolves for months.
That’s why so-called “brain rot artefacts” – grotesque toys, internet slang, absurdist memes – matter. Sure, they’re visually abrasive, and sometimes jarring, but they’re not trivial rubbish. They’re cultural anchors: signals that survive the filter test, offering shared reference points in an otherwise chaotic feed.
Cultural Receipts, Not Cultural Failures
To dismiss these aesthetics as “rot” is to miss their function. In a broader cultural climate of instability, political polarisation and algorithmic churn, absurdity becomes the one true coping mechanism – a way to metabolise a chaotic world into something communal, ironic, and bearable. Brands and organisations are hot onto this, and it’s why the UK Labour Party’s Instagram currently resembles a meme page.
Reid Litman nails this theory – we shouldn’t consider “brain rot” as evidence of decay, but as a cultural receipt. A reflection of broken systems, reframed through humour, nostalgia, or absurdity.
Projection and Irony
The sting of “brain rot” lies in how it’s projected. The label excuses people from engaging with what they don’t understand while ignoring the ways they, too, contribute to the same churn. Scroll LinkedIn for five minutes; it’s full of AI-generated sludge – 54% of all posts on the platform are now AI generated. Brands and users pump out endless content to stay relevant. If that’s not evidence of brain rot in practice, I’m not sure what is.
Closing Thought
“Brain rot” shouldn’t be thrown around as an insult, or reserved exclusively for fast-paced content, or the likes of Labubus. It reflects our anxieties about culture moving too fast, about not knowing how to process the absurd. Instead of flattening creativity under a sneer, we might recognise it as a means of endurance: messy, ironic, adaptive.
Dismiss it if you like. But in a fractured reality, this absurdity isn’t failure – it’s how people are staying sane.
