brain rot
Internet slang that evolved to describe the mental decay from consuming mindlessly addictive, low-quality online contentβand the garbage content itself.
"A man with a beard and glasses is doing a YouTube explainer video. He is explaining that a lot of new words come from incel forums in the early 2000s. Then he discusses other words coming from Black culture. Key Quote: "These are all quintessential examples of brain rot." Tone: Informative"
Brain rot perfectly captures the modern internet's ultimate irony: we voluntarily poison our minds with content so aggressively stupid that we need a medical term to describe it. It's the collective realization that somewhere between your 47th Skibidi Toilet video and learning what "gyatt" means, your neurons started filing for workers' compensation.
The phrase evolved organically across platforms as people desperately searched for words to describe the mental fog after hours of algorithmic feeding. No single creator owns itβit emerged from the primordial soup of Reddit threads, TikTok comment sections, and group chats where friends tried to explain why they just spent three hours watching someone "mew" their jawline.
Brain rot spread because it named something everyone recognized but couldn't articulate: that specific brand of digital shame when you realize you've been intellectually strip-mining your own consciousness. The term gained ultimate legitimacy when Oxford named it Word of the Year 2024, proving that even dictionaries can catch the rot.
Now people use it both as diagnosis ("I have brain rot from watching Gen Alpha content") and description ("That video is pure brain rot").