LET YOUR BRAIN ROT IN PEACE

Is our infinite scrolling really going to our heads?

- Words FIORELLA VALDESOLO

It's around 9 pm, my six-year-old is sleeping, so is the dog, and I've begun my nightly scrolling. I start with a flurry of memes generated by Beyoncé's shockingly shocked expression at the Grammy Awards upon hearing of her Best Country Album win ("When they accept your insurance"; "When you forget to blow out the Diptyque"), LOLing as I go. I watch a dewy-cheeked food influencer with a tomato-red manicure so perfect it implies limited engagement with actual kitchen tasks making a day's worth of protein-packed meals that are, she insists, super easy, then a series of videos demonstrating exercises (also, according to the Lycra-bound creator, super easy) that will whittle away my midlife midsection weight gain. Feeling targeted and exasperated, I head instead down a long and lovely rabbit hole of real estate in the French countryside (pergolas! pools!), which, despite having zero grasp on the language and not enough zeros on my bank account balance, still seem somehow like a plausible possibility, before taking a sharp turn into watching capybaras contentedly soaking themselves in mud baths.

What I qualify as evening ritual, the Oxford English Dictionary would likely call something else: Brain rot. It's the term that, last December, the Oxford University Press dubbed the word of the year. The editors defined it thusly: “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.”