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Brain Rot: The Viral Pandemic of Modern Minds
How Social Media Is Slowly Dismantling Our Brains (and Why We Can’t Stop Laughing About It)
You scroll. You laugh. You forget. TikTok montages, endless Instagram reels, bizarre memes, and absurd videos flood your screen. You call it entertainment; Oxford University Press calls it brain rot, the word of 2024. It’s the perfect diagnosis for a generation caught in a spiral of mindless content — and, ironically, we find it hilarious.
But behind the humor lies something darker: a mental erosion quietly reshaping how we think, focus, and perceive the world. So, how did “brain rot” go viral, and what does it say about our relationship with the digital universe?
Let’s scroll through the symptoms.
What Exactly Is “Brain Rot”?
At its core, brain rot refers to the perceived deterioration of mental and intellectual capacity due to the consumption of low-quality content. Think of hours spent watching cats fall off counters, or meaningless TikTok trends where people mimic dance moves without context. It’s entertainment without nourishment — the fast food of the digital world.
Oxford defines it as: “A deterioration of an individual’s mental or intellectual state, particularly…
