By Marci Cottingham and Chau Anh

Chau Anh Nguyen is from Hanoi, Vietnam and currently a senior at Kenyon College majoring in English and sociology

If we take words of the year as indicators of the current zeitgeist, then what can sociologists make of brain rot, Oxford’s 2024 word of the year? It is defined as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.”

Low-quality internet content is presumed to have a negative impact on one’s intellect. The rot-inducing qualities include nonsensicalness, short-form, lack of context, absurdity, and so on. It comes in multiple forms, including shorthand slang (e.g. skibidi toilet, rizz/rizzler, goon, edge, beta sigma alpha, sus, among us, ohio), rapid reels and TikTok, and absurd AI-generated videos.

A proportion of the brain-rotting corpus is what qualifies as slop (which was Merriam-Webster’s 2025 Word of the Year). One can recognize slop when they see it: semi-realistically animated animals exhibiting uncanny behaviors, prank videos that defy the laws of physics. Discussions of brain rot echo COVID reports of “brain fog,” a now-recognized medical term encompassing sluggish feelings and decreased cognitive abilities, including memory, attention, problem-solving, and so on.

So, some of us have brain fog; every internet corner oozes with AI-slop; and youth are speaking of brain rot. Going further, some jokingly ask for their brains to be lobotomized: lobotomy-core recently became a popular aesthetic, as evidenced by the 9.3 million views on TikTok that the hashtag #lobotomychic has garnered. “I don’t want to be a girlboss anymore, i want to take pictures of the cows while my husband drives me to my lobotomy,” laments one X user to the response of over 17K likers. The meme-ifcation of wanting a lobotomy, coming dominantly from women, is rampant on X and TikTok.

What can we say sociologically about the half-joking/half-serious cultural embrace of diminished intellectual capacities?

Scholarship on brain rot often focuses on the effects, including mental fogginess, lethargy, reduced attention span, and cognitive decline. Individuals partaking in brain-rot content are often framed as passive. Because of the proliferation of social media content, individuals can consume brain-rot content endlessly.

But can consumers of brain rot culture also be agentic actors? Or in other words, can we reframe brain rot as an active practice?

A University of Oslo study argues that brain rot can be productively understood “as a collection of related and familiar practices structuring meaningful aspects of young people’s lives.” By observing youth in workshops featuring a mix of creative tasks and making TikToks, the researchers learned how youth make sense of the brain-rot content they engage with. A salient quote from the study was “But it’s not productive, that’s the point.” This intentional nonproductivity might say something important about how young people confront conflicting messages about the risks, value, and inevitability of technology and their intellectual development.

Understood through this perspective, the point of brain rot is to reject productivity and contest the cultural imperatives towards constant self-optimization. Through practicing brain rot, engaging with slop, or cheekily sharing lobotomycore, an individual can aspire toward a type of tranquil stupor found from intentionally turning off their brain.

This perspective shifts us away from seeing brain rot as a mere cognitive decline caused by consumption of frivolous content, and instead, towards a more nuanced understanding in which brain rot can be a cultural practice emergent in a context of growing demands and tensions about the relationship between technology and human intelligence.

Just as nineteenth century Luddites damaged textile machinery to protest the de-skilling of their craft, perhaps sabotaging one’s intellectual development, in a knowledge economy, is a modern equivalent. Young people are in a confusing time regarding where knowledge work stands: The unemployment rate of recent college graduates has exceeded the country’s overall rate for five years in a row. 

The rise of artificial intelligence has cannibalized jobs, especially in entry-level employment. However, occupations in which AI supplements instead of substituting human thinking are experiencing growth, which indicates an expectation for young people to cultivate the cognitive capacity to synthesize their thoughts with AI input.

All these become mixed signals to how our brains ought to be utilized: Am I to offload some thinking to a machine? Am I to maximize my brain in a certain way so that AI can’t replace me? Is it still worthwhile to pursue higher education? How is intellect currently defined anyway? What if I just put this work tool I have in my skull on hold for a while, let it rot a bit? Especially when its value (and mine) are so unclear these days.

The fatigue is real. Brain-rotting can be a way of opting out — an emotion practice to manage the exhaustion that accompanies the current moment that not only calls us toward endless optimization, but expects us to navigate uncertainty and mixed signals when it comes to productivity, self-care, and consumption.

The need for a self-induced stupor is not new. Every generation has its designated brain rot: from gothic novels to the movies, any emerging cultural product runs the risk of being termed the newest mind-corruptors. But brain rot’s popularity speaks to particularities of our current era — one in which the rewards of intellectual development are unclear and short-form content and slop vie for young people’s attention.

The emotions born out of this cultural moment can include anxiety, precarity, fatigue and a subsequent craving for comforting stupor. Young people popularized the word “brain rot” (and its older related term, doomscrolling) to capture the practices of channeling these emergent feelings. This suggests that brain rot might also be a neo-emotion, “cultural practices that expand established lexicons” when it comes to subjective feelings and the management of emotions. Framing brainrot as a cultural practice prompted by new contexts and social demands helps us see it as not a mere sign of this generation’s supposed intellectual decay, but instead a response to the uncertainty of the modern tech-infused job market.

So, whether young brains are turning to mush or not, what is certain is their understandable struggle to know what they should be doing with those brains instead.