“Aura” to the left of me, “fanum tax” to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle with “rizz.”

Yes, that’s how I started this article. And if you understand what any of those phrases mean, that’s the problem.

In recent memory, the term “brain rot” has gained a lot of traction as a way of describing the overconsumption of low-quality media on digital platforms such as TikTok and Instagram and how it affects us from a mental standpoint. Basically, “brain rot” describes how much mental exhaustion you’ve collected from spending time on the internet.

“Brain rot” is nothing new, but over the past couple of years, that phrase has surged in popularity. As a matter of fact, Oxford University Press selected “brain rot” as its 2024 Word of The Year. Oxford University Press, the publisher of the Oxford English Dictionary. 

If you’re as chronically online as I am, you’re bound to be infected by it in some capacity. 

Look at Rowan University, for example. There was literally a student-organized “brain rot” contest a few months ago and we wrote about it!

These students stood out front by the owl statue and spent their afternoons doing bits for one another all for $20. To be fair, everyone involved was having fun and no one got hurt, so I’ll support that 100%. That doesn’t change the fact, however, that “brain rot” is very real and lives in many of us, including college students who spend so much of their time on social media.

Now, I don’t mean to make “brain rot” sound like some kind of disease. After all, it’s not entirely bad. “Brain rot” is completely mindless, so it can be quite amusing. You spend enough time scrolling through TikTok, some form of it is going to stick with you whether you like it or not. I’ll tell you about my most recent “brain rot” fascination: the memes surrounding “A Minecraft Movie.”

If you don’t follow pop culture, A Minecraft Movie, starring Jack Black and Jason Momoa, is based on the popular video game (Minecraft). Leading up to the movie’s release, memes related to Jack Black’s portrayal of the infamous Minecraft character, Steve, were already forming and spreading like wildfire. A Minecraft Movie opened last week, and it doubled its expected box office projection, making $157 million this past weekend. Simultaneously, movie critics ranging from Rotten Tomatoes to IMDB are giving mediocre reviews of A Minecraft Movie. It’s performing so well, yet critics are tearing it apart. Why?

The answer lies in “brain rot.” There’s a TikTok trend going around now of people going to see A Minecraft Movie and giving immense overreactions to the scenes that contain memes such as “Chicken Jockey” and “I…am Steve.”At the sight of these quotes, the trend sees people yelling and cheering wildly, throwing their popcorn and drinks into the air. Though it makes for a humorous TikTok clip, it’s caused quite a headache not just for movie theater staff, but for law enforcement as well, as some situations required the police to be called and have to escort the movie disruptors out of the theater.

The point I’m trying to get across here is that this whole idea of “brain rot” culture is trending in a potentially bad direction. 

It’s one thing to get a couple of words or phrases stuck in your head and stuck in your vocabulary, but if it begins causing problems for the people around us, at what point do we take a step back and acknowledge the damage? At what point do we try to fix it? It’s all fun and games until it isn’t, and I think we’re getting close to that line being blurred beyond the point of no return.

So how can we avoid “brain rot”? Well, there’s not much of a permanent solution, especially with the varying amounts of our lives that require us to venture into the online world. We can control, however, the amount of time we spend on social media outside of any necessary usage, if there’s such a thing.

If you keep up with The Whit’s opinion articles at all, you may have seen a couple of articles advising readers to take some time away from social media. As difficult as it may be, that’s probably the best solution to take. It’s hard not to have some sort of presence on social media. In the blink of an eye, you can quickly fall out of the loop on what’s new and hip and trending, but is that really such a bad thing? The more time we spend involving ourselves in the world of social media, letting our brains figuratively and literally rot at the hands of its variety of content, the more we lose our comprehension of actual reality.

My advice would be to start keeping track of your screen time. You don’t have to go completely off the grid, but maybe give TikTok and other similar apps a break every now and then. Touch grass, if you will. A little bit of “brain rot” every now and then won’t kill you, of course, but you need to know your limits. After all, you may already be feeling its harsh effects.

Or in “brain rot” terminology, you may already be cooked. No cap about that, chief.

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