Via u/nocontextzone
A Welcome Distraction
Young adults have so much on their minds these days. Juggling feelings that the end of the world is near, looming bills, unignorable cracks in our society, and, of course, situationship drama. Really, everybody just wants to unwind and relax. However, the only way to completely unplug any overworked brain is by laughing at whatever bogus content is riding through on the social media conveyor belt. Luckily, Gen Alpha kids, who are now highschoolers, have cultivated and curated an entire genre of humor that perfectly suits this need: Brainrot.
“Brainrot [is just] stupid, mindless internet (mostly through TikTok) content,” according to Emilie Owens, a youth researcher from The University of Oslo. While discussing TikTok brainrot content with a focus group of teenagers, Owens got to the bottom of the real reason they seek seemingly meaningless content online. As it turns out, they’re looking for distractions from the terrors of reality. One teen admitted, “It’s, like, the climate stuff… I feel like grown-ups don’t care; they are making decisions that are going to ruin everything for us. It makes me feel bad because there’s nothing I can do.”
However, later in the session, the same teens circled around a phone, chuckling happily at a silly brainrot video. Escaping the dread of an unknown future is not exclusive to teens. Owens continues her analysis afterwards saying, “TikTok is one tool for tuning out all the stress [with] mindless content, and to turn off their brains for a while. You might say that brainrot is a necessary strategy for managing particular anxieties at this precise moment in history, fraught as it is with conflict, catastrophe, and predictions of future doom.”
TikTok’s duality, as both an informative tool and a dissociative mechanism, is invaluable. When the horror-stricken news feeds and spiralling anxiety starts to take root, it’s time to switch it up with some intentionally foolish content, willingly rotting the brain to give it a well-deserved rest.
Tralalero Tralala
Poorly animated, colorful characters, and general visual absurdity are a few of the characterizations of classic brainrot. Take, for example, “Ballerina Cappuccina,” the chic, yet teacup-headed coffee lady, or “Bombardiro Crocodilo” (the crocodilian B-52-bomber). These are just a few of the Italian brainrot animals that have swarmed the Internet recently.
Via u/chispas_ok
Via u/agentzoe
Heroically swooping into our feeds, brainrot memes like these AI generated horrors, are here to make the mentally exhausted, distraction seekers find the chuckle they’re looking for. But how? What does it even mean? They’re simple, silly, and just downright dumb—and the entire point is that we don’t know what it means and it doesn’t matter. There’s no clever joke and no witty quips, these memes are literally just entertaining because they look derpy and they sound funny. And unless you’re fluent in Italian (or deep-diving into the Italian brainrot wiki page, like I just did), these characters, and the songs that describe them, sound like lyrical, word-mush that you can spam over to your friends, sharing a meaningless laugh together through visual humor.
It’s that simple.
Like a caveman discovering fire, young people have globbed onto brainrot memes simply because of the fleeting joy of laughing at something dumb and turning off your aching brain. You don’t need to critically think about anything when you’re looking at an animorph B-52—its mere existence is captivating because of a simplistic, moronic quality that all brainrot memes share.
Via u/memebase
One of the most well-known brainrot trends, Skibidi Toilet, the humanoid toilet-bodied, alien invasion series on YouTube, paved the way for brainrot humor in 2023. Since then, brainrot has begged the question of what is going on in the minds of young adults and kids. The answer? Too much. There’s too much going on in our minds to comprehend another moment of complication, even in our entertainment sphere—brainrot acts as an off-switch for a rattling, anxious mind.
Killswitch Engaged
Brainrot is, “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of online content considered to be trivial or unchallenging.” Funnily enough, when read in the condescending voice you would imagine from Oxford, this definition sounds like brainrot is a bad thing, despite it being the “2024 Word of the Year.” An astute intellectual may scoff at the stupidness of nonsensical TikTok content, but they’re not looking at the entire picture. Constantly flooded with information, society deserves an break, which is why brainrot serves a critical function.
Brainrot is as vital as fungi in a forest. Without fungi to break down rotting tree branches, the whole ecosystem would be lacking essential nutrients, cluttered with debris, and totally out of wack—thus, a fungal forest is a healthy forest. Similarly, brainrot videos maintain the health of our overstimulated minds, helping us to digest a rough day of information inundation by dialing everything down to a simmer where we can chuckle at something silly without overexerting. This process not only rids our brain-forest of debris, but helps us recoup our mental fortitude through memes.
Even for just a moment, we can enjoy ignorant bliss, laughing at a twerking grizzly bear or a ballerina latte—and you better believe we won’t pass up the chance to laugh, because, these days, you never know what atrocious headlines awaits us tomorrow.