“Brain rot” is another in a long, disjointed list of words that spell out a pattern if one pieces them together. (Canva Image/Representational)
Dec 3, 2024 21:49 IST First published on: Dec 3, 2024 at 15:50 IST
There is a famous song by a famous singer that often comes to mind these days. Finneas in ‘The 90s’ sings, “I think about the ’90s/ When the future was a testament/ To something beautiful and shiny, now/ We’re only counting down the time that’s left/ With everything behind me”.
Generation after generation, the question of inheritance comes up. A blue blood inheritance can make people, an inheritance of illness can unmake them. But most importantly, it reminds us: You came from somewhere. You are one notch in a long legacy of creation. Gen Z’s inheritance is giant technological marvels and a world that is coming apart at the seams. It is chaos. It is absurdity. Oxford University Press seems to agree. Its Word of the Year, picked after wide public discussion, is “brain rot” — as in what happens to the brain in the absence of any inconvenience, in the age of absolute access. (Think: BlinkIt, Swiggy, 5G internet, touch-screen phones that double up as movie screens) Brain rot, as in what your brain does when its job, increasingly, seems to be to just sit back and watch the computers take over. (Think: AI overviews, chatbots that can simplify complex texts, “smart” watches, TVs, fridges, homes). Brain rot, as in something that can help the brain revel in its rotting. (Think: Reality TV, doom-scrolling, meta humour)
“Brain rot” is another in a long, disjointed list of words that spell out a pattern if one pieces them together. The Chill Guy/Girl, the “this is fine” meme (while sitting inside a house on fire), and of course, bed rot, all communicate surreal disengagement. The general sentiment seems to be: “Yeah, we know it’s all gone for a toss. What about it?” Tied together with humour and heavy, sometimes concerning, levels of irony, brain rot is how this generation reckons with all things serious, for a lack of a choice. This is how it engages with its absurd inheritance — economic and global orders in collapse, life-threatening diseases on the up and up, different kinds of privacy compromised, corporate capture and a climate catastrophe to which they have front-row seats. Casper Grathwohl, president of Oxford Languages, says about this year’s selection: “It demonstrates a somewhat cheeky self-awareness in the younger generations about the harmful impact of social media that they’ve inherited.” It is, in essence, like most Gen Z humour, an “in joke”. The punchline is: “We’re all gonna die”.
Brain rot makes up part of another digital puzzle — this year, like previous ones, saw many dictionaries and platforms pick words that are attempting to capture the swell of technological changes we are living through. The runners-up for Oxford were “lore”, “demure”, “romantasy” which are all either born out of the internet age or have regained prominence and new meaning thanks to it. “Demure” is the word of the year for Dictionary.com. The anxiety of not wanting to be caught off-guard, like when Facebook and its ilk took off in the bad old Noughties, is palpable. Everybody, from governments to journalists to citizens, seems to want to take this culture apart and understand exactly what’s going on as it is going on – and what it all means. Hence, the many words of the year, all announcing the arrival of a moment we’ve been in the middle of for a quarter of a century.
The absurdists have it, folks. We are all hurtling towards an unknowable, probably unpleasant, oblivion. Choking on the air we are trying to breathe, alarm bell after alarm bell about the dangers of the (mis/dis)information age, and the cruelties we witness while it all goes on — there is a sour taste in the mouth, and not much hope to work with. But while the world blindly panics with hits and misses, one generation’s strategy seems to be, “this is fine”. As long as we are laughing, “this is going to be fine”. There may be a lesson in that.
sukhmani.malik@expressindia.com
