One of my favorite parts of family gatherings is expanding my vocabulary with the help of my teenage niece. Among the many words I learned this year — in addition to “Skibidi Ohio,” which apparently means strange or weird — is the term “brain rot.”
My niece explained that brain rot is what happens to your brain when you mindlessly scroll through social media until your brain turns to mush. Little did she know she was teaching me the Oxford Word of the Year for 2024.
But while we might not be familiar with the term, I’m sure most of us probably know this sensation all too well.
On the official Oxford University Press website we learn that brain rot is “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.”
Oxford University Press noted that the term actually goes back to 1854 and was used, hyphenated, by Henry David Thoreau in “Walden.” But it has gained prominence in recent years over “concerns about the impact of consuming excessive amounts of low-quality online content, especially on social media,” and that usage of this term increased 230% from 2023 to 2024.
The problem of brain rot has reached such global scale as to warrant the concern of Pope Francis. The pope recently wrote to Catholic clergymen about the destructive “obsession with ‘screens’ and with toxic, superficial and violent fake news” and suggested that rich, meaningful literature — the works of Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes and so forth — can help reduce and even reverse the rot so pervasive in the minds of many today.
I couldn’t agree more.
Yet, aside from the increasing popularity of subtly or explicitly pornographic novels (a form of brain rot compounded with the far more corrosive soul rot), I’m not sure that many people read the kind of literature prescribed by the pope, the kind that expands the mind, not simply distracts it from the doldrums of daily life. Maybe it’s because we’ve forgotten why it’s so important.
To remember, we must go back more than 400 years ago to Spain, to La Mancha, where we find one of the first instances of brain rot in all of literary history.
In 1605, Miguel de Cervantes wrote of a madman close to death who rotted his brain by reading so many novels about knights in shining armor that “se le secó el cerebro” — his brain dried up — and he went insane, believing himself to be one of his beloved fictional knights. That man called himself Don Quixote.
Many who’ve never read the novel, however, don’t know the real brain-rotted Don Quixote; they know the kitsch Broadway Don Quixote from “Man of La Mancha,” who dreams “the impossible dream” as some supposed modern American hero. But in reading Cervantes’ original literary “Don Quixote,” you will learn the truth and find that many of our problems today are not so new after all.
In order to understand the depth of Don Quixote’s brain rot, let me illustrate a modern equivalent. Imagine a man in his early 80s, close to death. He has no family, some land and an addiction to “Star Wars” fan-fiction novels so gripping that he begins to believe he is a Jedi Knight.
Now imagine this bone-thin, mangily man donning the Halloween robes of a Jedi, arming himself with a plastic Obi Wan light saber and making his way to the back of the local Walmart to “destroy the droids” or many gallons of milk (like Don Quixote fighting windmills as “giants”) and wreaking frothy havoc on aisle 15 for some other poor soul to have to deal with.
This story sounds insane until you watch this viral Youtube video, now over a decade old. It shows a prank that is now something of an archetype for much of the unfortunate content we see on the internet: a few kids going into a grocery store and faking (or fictionalizing, like Don Quixote) painful “accidents” by throwing gallons of milk all over the floor. The video now has over 40 million views.
While watching the video, like the embarrassing TikTok pranks online, you feel both entertained and disappointed by your own entertainment.
The second-hand embarrassment you feel while watching a now endless stream of these videos is similar to what one experiences when reading “Don Quixote.”
As Don Quixote confesses his love to a woman “whose breath would make any other vomit,” you feel pity for this brain-rotted man who, like many today, exchanges sleep for mindless reading (scrolling damaging our circadian rhythms), envisions windmills as giants (video games as a substitute for fulfilling work in the world), and perceives prostitutes as princesses (the social acceptance of pornography and OnlyFans filth).
The master novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote that “Don Quixote” was “the saddest book ever written” because “it is a story of disillusionment.” But for us today, this disillusionment becomes valuable as we see many modern Don Quixotes seek to make a living by offering their bodies, their minds and perhaps their souls for meaningless internet content.
The difference between the novel and today’s internet content, however, is that in the 1,000 pages of “Don Quixote” there is complexity, richness, depth and meaning, and our brains emerge better for the reading. In those pages, Cervantes takes a man who rots his brain and imbues him with wisdom, courage and integrity and gives us lines such as “Truth may be stretched thin, but never breaks, and it always rises above lies, like oil in water.”
The truth of our culture of brain rot is that eventually, like oil in water, we will begin to see (and are already beginning to see) how damaging and destructive that this mindless internet content will prove to be. May we begin the new year determined to read more and scroll less.