Memory loss. brain dissolves into water. vector illustration Photo: 123rf
One hundred and 62 years after he died, American Philosopher Henry David Thoreau is suddenly having a moment, and it's all thanks to Gen Z and emergent demographic Gen Alpha.
It's nothing to do with his essays on political transcendentalism and proto-anarchism, but entirely due to an inconspicuous phrase coined in his 1854 book Walden - a treatise detailing that one time Thoreau went to live in the woods for a couple of years, in order to write a book about living in the woods for a couple of years.
That phrase is of course, "brain rot", which has been crowned Oxford's Word of the Year 2024. Technically, yes, it's two words. But who wants to risk getting pedantic with an Oxford dictionary?
The term "brain rot" has increased in usage frequency by 230 percent between 2023 and 2024, gaining new prominence as a term used to describe the impact of consuming excessive amounts of low-quality online content.
Thoreau used the term to parallel the potato blight that was causing hunger and famine across Europe, with a perceived decline in society's intelligence.
"While England endeavours to cure the potato rot," Thoreau opined from his comfortable cabin by lake Walden, "will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?"
Henry, dear Henry, you had no idea how far we'd fall.
Fast forward to today, and the potato blight is a distant memory, but today's brain rot has gone digital, oozing forth from the flat voids of our personal devices.
In the parlance of 2024 "brain rot" is used to describe the zombified state induced by ceaseless TikTok scrolling and doom scrolling.
According to modern researchers, brain rot manifests as memory loss, reduced attention spans, and an alarming urge to regurgitate TikTok memes in conversation. Doomscrolling also contributes to brain rot, creating a stew of anxiety, fatigue, and a pervasive sense of "Why did I just spend three hours watching … what the hell was I even watching again?"
In the same way the wayward youth of the 1850s were idling their lives away with darts, skittles and cross-stitch, Generation Alpha, in particular, finds itself immersed in an unending torrent of digital culture where the cultural zeitgeist changes with the flick of thumb, manifesting out of the sewers of the mind with "Skibidi Toilet" one minute, "rizz," and "gyatt" the next.
While Thoreau warned of decaying intellectual standards and subsequent collapse of society, we now debate whether viral YouTube shorts are the harbingers of our mental apocalypse. Compared to the mind-eating sludge on offer today, they might say, "nek minute" and the memes of yesterday's internet are positively Shakespearean.
The President of Oxford Languages, Caspar Grathwohl, said about this year's selection process, "I find it fascinating that the term "brain rot" has been adopted by Gen Z and Gen Alpha, those communities largely responsible for the use and creation of the digital content the term refers to … It demonstrates a somewhat cheeky self-awareness in the younger generations about the harmful impact of social media that they've inherited".
Perhaps it's time to reconsider. Is brain rot merely a sign of cultural decay, or could it be an evolutionary response? After all, in an era where every fact is searchable, who needs memory? Why solve problems when an algorithm does it for you?
And on that note, here's a list of all the other words of the year for 2024 crowned by less high-falutin' dictionaries:
Enshittification - Macquarie Dictionary, noun - the deterioration of a service brought about by a reduction in the service provided.
Manifest - Cambridge Dictionary, verb - to imagine something you want, in the belief that doing so will make it more likely to happen.
Brat - Collins Dictionary, noun - Charlie XCX fans.
Demure - Dictionary.com, adjective - used to describe a refined or sophisticated appearance or behaviour.
Colesworth - The Australian National Dictionary, adjective - a pejorative portmanteau used to describe Australia's supermarket duopoly of Coles and Woolworths.
