{"id":101796,"date":"2025-05-02T13:23:38","date_gmt":"2025-05-02T13:23:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/us\/?post_type=articles&p=101796"},"modified":"2025-04-28T16:23:54","modified_gmt":"2025-04-28T16:23:54","slug":"brain-rot-technology-scrolling-reality-television-grazia-usa-spring-2025","status":"publish","type":"articles","link":"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/us\/articles\/brain-rot-technology-scrolling-reality-television-grazia-usa-spring-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"Let Our Brain Rot in Peace"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Real Housewives<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Words by Fiorella Valdesolo<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

It\u2019s around 9 p.m., my six-year-old is sleeping, so is the dog, and I\u2019ve begun my nightly scrolling. I start with a flurry of memes generated by Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s shockingly shocked expression at the Grammy Awards upon hearing of her Best Country Album win (\u201cWhen they accept your insurance\u201d; \u201cWhen you forget to blow out the Diptyque\u201d), 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\u2019s 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 rabbithole 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.<\/p>\n

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Nicole \u201cSnooki\u201d Polizzi<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

What I qualify as evening ritual, the Oxford English Dictionary <\/i>would likely call something else: brain rot. It\u2019s the term that, last December, the Oxford University Press dubbed the word of the year. The editors defined it thusly: \u201cThe supposed deterioration of a person\u2019s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.\u201d While the word may be perfectly suited for the digitally driven times we find ourselves in, it\u2019s not new. Brain rot was first coined by Henry David Thoreau way back in 1854. Thoreau, who famously extolled the benefits, both physical and mental, of living a simpler life immersed in the natural world, decried 19th-century society\u2019s nosedive into feeble-mindedness, something he attributed in part (and presciently) to an increasingly rapid news cycle. He wrote: \u201c<\/i>While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot\u2014which prevails so much more widely and fatally?\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n

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Beavis and Butt-Head<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

While Thoreau and his peers weren\u2019t scrolling funny cat videos, the notion that a cycle of mental distraction, whatever it may be, could prove fatal for our brain health remains front of mind. The past few years have brought with them a rise in media coverage about how our current tech immersion is doing everything from lowering our IQs to affecting our ability to focus to, at its most extreme, actually damaging our brains. The headlines may be shouty, but the scientific studies to back up the brain-rotting effects at least remain flimsy. Some psychiatrists and psychologists who study the impacts of digital technology say that the evidence of it permanently altering the brain simply isn\u2019t there. That\u2019s not to say that repetitive engagement with technology doesn\u2019t do significant harm: It can act as tinder for addictive behavior and accelerate anxieties and fears, it can put adolescents at heightened risk for depression, plus also have physical repercussions from neck and shoulder pain to headaches to carpal tunnel to exhausted (so very exhausted) eyeballs. It\u2019s a cruel irony that the phones we are engaging with for countless hours of our days are also the ones that remind us daily of that crippling over-engagement.<\/p>\n

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Beyonc\u00e9 meme<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But every wave of change in how we communicate, particularly the tidal waves that technological advancements like cell phones have brought, has long been met with concern and public outcry. Way back in the day, Greek philosopher Plato and his teacher Socrates were both distressed that the act of writing (which in their oratory times could be qualified as tech) would be detrimental to cognition; consider it the OG brain rot. As Plato wrote in Phaedrus<\/i>, a 370 BC record of dialogues between him and Socrates: \u201cIf men learn [writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.\u201d There was the worry during Thoreau\u2019s time of newspapers\u2019 commodification of news, the \u201cradiophobia\u201d of the 1920s when people fretted about both the actual transmission of radio waves and that it would interfere with communal activities, and the concerns in the 1950s around the arrival of television, aka the boob tube. In a 1950 Boston University graduation speech, the school\u2019s president said: \u201cTelevision often serves to distract. \u2026 If the television craze continues with the present level of programs, we are destined to have a nation of morons.\u201d What would this man think of TikTok?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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Real Housewives of Beverly Hills<\/em>, season 14<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

To be human though is to be adaptable, both to these inevitable advancements in technology (as a Gen Xer, I\u2019ve experienced a few already) and to the just as inevitable evolutions in communication. Oxford, in its nomination of brain rot, also mentioned the emergence of \u201cbrain rot language,\u201d words as nonsensical as the digital content that birthed them. As someone with an elementary-age daughter and tween and teen nieces and nephews, I\u2019m familiar with them all. But to me, rizz<\/i> and skibidi <\/i>and sigma<\/i> aren\u2019t ominous harbingers of a language in decline, but one that\u2019s in motion, albeit more quickly than ever before. Every generation has its own slang, what connects its members to each other and to a moment in time, and to say that all these terms are brain rot feels stodgy. Or rather, sus<\/i>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

“The supposed deterioration of a person\u2019s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material<\/strong> (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But is this infinite scrolling now dubbed brain rot actually making us into the morons suggested in that 1950 speech? Am I dumber because I regularly seek out celebrity plastic surgery summaries or corgis running or Getty-watermarked \u201890s red carpet events? Is it the content itself that\u2019s bad or the amount of time we\u2019re spending engaging with it? I\u2019d say the latter. Take the various Real Housewives<\/i>, a bucket of television Oxford likely had in mind as exemplary of brain rot, but that happens to be beloved by women I would qualify as quite brainy (see Michelle Obama, Roxane Gay, and Meryl Streep). The franchise has been the subject of academic dissertations and Nellini Stamp, a director of strategy for the Working Families Party, brilliantly fuses the Real Housewives and politics on her popular Instagram account RHOPOL. The most recent season of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills<\/i> averaged 4 million viewers across episodes; Succession<\/i> only had one episode, the finale, reach almost 3 million viewers. I\u2019d contend that the shows, one a guilty pleasure, the other a critical darling (both of which I heartily partake in) actually share much in common\u2014they are bizarre games of human chess with endless bickering, rampant spending, cutthroat ambition, shifty brilliance, monstrous egos, and utter delusion. So are they both rotting our brain?<\/p>\n

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Rich cat (left); English comedian and actor, Benny Hill (right)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

One issue with the so-called trivial material we infinitely scroll is that oftentimes it\u2019s an algorithm puppeting what we see and what we don\u2019t. Then there\u2019s the quick-fire pace of all that information (and misinformation) being thrown out for your consumption. Unless you, like I, have a soft spot for the cleaning corner of YouTube, where videos are devoted to the methodical degunking of carpets or computer keyboards. (Channels Mountain Rug Cleaning and Cleaning the Dirtiest each have around 2 million subscribers.) The transformations are slow and steady and deeply satisfying; watching something be thoroughly cleaned, a task tidily completed, feels like an antidote to our current chaos. Yes, it\u2019s probably unchallenging content, but it serves a purpose. And I\u2019d argue that having and raising a child while figuring out how to be a fully functional human at my job has done more to harm my brain than the collective hours I\u2019ve spent staring at capybaras in the mud or watching back-to-back episodes of heated Housewives exchanges. Much like everything else, all this highly snackable content is simply best consumed in moderation. Take regular breaks, don\u2019t rely on tech at absolutely every touchpoint of your life, and engage frequently with some form of nature (though most of us can\u2019t retreat to the woods like Thoreau when we want to live deliberately). We are living through unprecedented, depressing, and downright bizarre times, and when reality bites you often have to find a way to check out, albeit briefly, and let your brain rot to have the stamina and willingness to carry on. I certainly do.<\/p>\n

PHOTOS: GETTY IMAGES; INSTAGRAM<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Read GRAZIA USA\u2019<\/em>s Spring Issue<\/a> featuring cover star Paris Hilton<\/a>:<\/strong><\/h4>\n