The realities of being chronically online
“You see how we have titled the piece? Very mindful, very demure. Do you see how it is not giving your parents doom-scrolling on Facebook about your phone addiction? Also very mindful, very considerate.”
If you have set foot anywhere in the long, dark and obscured chessboard of the internet in the past year, it is very likely that you would be familiar with the dangling vines of misplaced TikTok references. Our days start with the onset of “rizz” and end with the sun-setting on “Skibidi Sigma toilet”. I am a fellow sheep of the herd, familiar with the twists and turns of “brain rot.” If my brain could speak to me, it would express a wild, convoluted jargon found only in the corners of Instagram Reels capable of leaving the average adult extremely concerned at worst and a little fazed at best. But what does it say about our collective mental experiences if our day-to-day language is moulded by ten-second viral snippets?
We dive into the bottomless waters of mindless scrolling and flashy images, encountering trends like “delulu”, the “orange peel theory”, or “brat summer.” However, what stares back at us is a hazy, discoloured reflection of the algorithm and a monkey with a banana. This is not to imply that every person with a phone is like a monkey with a banana, but just as asking the monkey to relinquish the banana in its hand would be a difficult ordeal – we too have tethered our happiness and existence to fleeting online moments of amusement, often sacrificing deep, meaningful relationships.
This illusive, surreal world that we have created—and seem to adore—has intertwined itself with humanity, and we don’t know where one ends and the other begins. Social Media and the internet did not suddenly take the world by storm, they slowly wrapped around us like ivy, becoming so intimately ingrained in us that existence without them seems impossible.
Fearing that this might romanticise the internet, let me be perfectly clear: the proximity and closeness between humanity and the internet have real-world, tangible impacts we have not witnessed before. What else can we expect from a phenomenon (femininomenon) described as the fourth industrial revolution? At the risk of sounding like a Gen X parent fervently trying to educate their kids about the dangers of digital media, concerns regarding the relationship between societal conditions and the mental health crisis among the youth may not be entirely unfounded.
Brain rot is a humorous and self-deprecating way to explain the mental fogginess following excessive social media and internet use. The symptoms seem uncomfortably akin to cognitive decline, including mental exhaustion, fatigue, decreased attention span and more. Though it is not a medically recognised condition, only a commonly used term to explain prevailing behaviour, the pattern of symptoms and results are too common and coincidental to be brushed off. Upon closer inspection, it becomes evident that being chronically online is not a personal struggle, but part of a larger, more complex shift in youth mental health—one that demands more than just a viral trend.
When we spend hours scrolling on apps, constantly consuming fast-paced content that feeds into our brain’s reward system, receiving distraction and validation with each press and swipe, we grow dependent on the internet. We rely on it to distract us, soothe us and interrupt us from our thoughts. Not a single moment to be left, alone and unattended with our own company. In essence, the term “brain rot” implies that overconsumption of social media might render us “less intelligent” or diminish our cognitive and emotional capabilities. Although this is a hyperbolic and exaggerated statement, it serves as a flag in the conversation about how being chronically online impacts our mental health.
In a New York Times article, Dr Michael Rich of the Digital Wellness lab explains how brain rot is less about being addicted to the internet and more about coping mechanisms for people grappling with underlying disorders who use zombie-scrolling and overlong gaming sessions to numb and distract themselves. Maftei, Merlici, and Dănilă (2023) explored the indirect relationship between social media usage and depressive symptoms in adolescents through a multidimensional perspective during the COVID-19 pandemic. Interestingly, their findings indicated that teenagers with high levels of depressive symptoms were more inclined to use social media and depend on it. While they could not attribute whether social media affected the adolescent’s well-being positively or negatively, they discovered that an overload of information often exacerbated symptoms and proved maladaptive for improving mental health. The multidimensional lens in the study considered the increasing difficulties during the COVID-19 pandemic and the role of technology in both professional and educational contexts, explaining how social media may have served as a coping mechanism during that time. Call it a habit or a legacy, this maladaptive coping strategy followed us out of the 2020 era into the new post-pandemic world. Dr Julia Kogan (Very Well Mind) also noted that particularly for adolescents, overexposure to news on social media and especially the polarisation of content curated by the algorithm can create a perception that the world is dangerous and harmful, heightening anxiety and other symptoms, especially at an age that is already fraught with fear about the future.
As entertaining as it is to joke about chronically online, brain-rotting humour, the endless hours spent “zombie-scrolling”, and “bed-rotting”; the connection between brain rot and the state of our society, particularly the mental health crisis in the youth, should not be forgotten.
While the reality sinks in and we realise that the vine of over usage and consumption may be closing in on us, suffocating from within, it might also be worth appreciating the irony of self-awareness humanity has been bestowed with. We understood that our consumption patterns are excessive, recognised all its effects and impacts and ended up coining an ironic, hyperbolic and trivialised term—brain rot—to self-deprecate on a global scale. If the etymology of it all is not amusing enough to distract from reality, perhaps it is time to understand that completely unplugging may not be the solution (nor is simply thanking Beyoncé). Instead, we must call to redefine our relationship with the virtual world before it defines us.
