We Need to Talk About Brainrot

0. Housekeeping

Before we begin I just wanted to drop a little note here to let you all know that I’m going to be switching to a once monthly blog post schedule. Taking a little extra time on this one and letting myself not only breathe but polish my thoughts a little bit more has made me realize I was pushing way too hard and spending too much time trying to catch up on writing/editing these.

The schedule may change again in the future.

1. In Person Collaboration and Other Lies Managers Tell

In 2020, we all went home to work and see what Covid would do to the world. There is a definitive change that resulted from that, others have commented upon it, and even suggested that it may have worsened the “loneliness epidemic.” The thing that I notice most, in retrospect, is that I started to lose touch with the state of normie culture. I don’t consider this to be an especially big problem, but it does set the stage for this post.

Up until recently, barring a short stint as an in-office code monkey, I had been able to continue the coding hermit trend. Even when I had to go in to the office for a brief stint my experience wasn’t representative of what “normal” has become. When you work with software developers you’re usually surrounded by a different sort of person. Most of us software developers are… quirky, in one way or another. I was often an outlier among my coworkers in that environment because I semi-regularly scan Hacker News to get an idea of what is going on in the tech world.

I have now rejoined the normies, working in public locations again. My second week back “in the world” I got Covid, the more things change the more they stay the same. I’m also currently near a much more populous city than I prefer, so I encounter more humans in public locations than I have for a very long time. And I have observations from the world to share.

The tidings from the frontlines are grim, friends. Brainrot has truly consumed the world. I’m currently sitting in a laundromat as I write this¹, waiting for my clothes to be done. On the large TV in the corner there is something called ChiveTV playing. It’s playing every time I come here. It’s endless short form videos, played back to back.

The funny part? People almost never watch it. Normally they play videos on their own phone, without headphones. Today the woman sitting adjacent to me scrolled and scrolled and scrolled, occasionally giggling. This is by no means a laundromat only phenomenon. I also see this happen in break rooms all over town while I am at work. It’s astonishing how many older people I see/hear scrolling brainrot for what appears to be the entirety of their breaks/lunches. When did that happen?

I want to stress that I’m not criticizing people for killing a little time while they sit down to rest their feet. I go looking for posts to engage with or make on my breaks too. I’m just surprised at how prevalent it has become, and concerned about how easily it becomes the default activity.

I am a huge proponent of the internet as a tool to learn anything. Sometimes I talk to people who say something like “I’m sure I can figure this out, find a YouTube video or something” and I feel a glimmer of hope. But then I use a public restroom and hear someone’s phone audio on speaker in the stalls and feel like we’ve never been closer to the WALL-E humans.

2. Vaccination

No, not like that. Against brainrot. I wrote previously about the gross state of social media, and why I quit using it. At that time I was on Bluesky, for self-promotional reasons. I’m now on X and Mastodon as well. Why? Self-promotional reasons. People have preferences, and it’s a lot to ask them to join a new platform to follow you. My theory, be everywhere the audience already is to lower the bar to engagement².

After so long without using any social media I’ve noticed that I’m more sensitive to when I’m wasting time. I’ve been vaccinated against brainrot, even though it’s an extremely imperfect vaccine. Accounts that endlessly post cute animal pictures? Mute. Not today Engagement Demon! This helps some, but it’s an easy slope to slide down. I really try to keep myself balanced and avoid scrolling too much junk. I try to check in with myself from time to time and make a judgement about how much time I’m spending there. When I don’t like what I see then I try to adjust my behavior.

The fact that it takes this amount of effort to monitor is extremely telling. The Social Media platforms are crafted to absorb our time and attention effortlessly. I think this is probably at the core of the brainrot takeover. It’s effortless, and doing things is hard. Didn’t like that clip? Don’t worry! Here’s another post right here. Does this spark dopamine? Stay here and consume!

If I wasn’t trying to increase my reach I would delete my accounts, right now. I would have done it the first time I got sucked in to the machine for longer than I was comfortable with. I’m not entirely certain how some people on there can endlessly churn out content and still get anything else done. And before you say it, I don’t think most of the ones I’m following use LLMs to generate posts.

I think those of us that are makers of things at our core probably encounter a similar inner conflict on these platforms. I want to tell as many people as possible that I’m doing things, so that they can see the things. This is because it will hopefully allow me to keep doing more things, and because I want to show off the things I am proud of making to people that like that sort of thing. But I also don’t particularly want to be part of the reason that someone spends their whole day scrolling. I also don’t want to be that spammy guy who only ever plugs his own thing until everyone hates me.

Unfortunately these desires seem to be directly in opposition to the way the brainrot machine works. In order to get any traction you need to be on there posting and replying and promoting nonstop. Anything you post is going to be buried in the deluge of things that other accounts are posting even on a follower’s timeline. The problem is much worse when you consider people that don’t already follow you. On their timeline you are competing with the entire section of the world that the algorithm thinks they might want to see. That cute pets account that makes a new post every 15 minutes has all the advantages.

3. Malaise

People don’t have hobbies anymore. A colleague of mine said that they spend one day of their weekend in bed watching shows. I’m not judging them, people should feel free to spend time in whatever way they find value in. I’m questioning why that is the thing they find most worthwhile. And I think it may be related to the current job market. I’m not a job-market-analysis-man, but people have expressed to me a feeling of “being stuck” in regard to their careers on a few occasions.

Is all this doom-scrolling the psychological equivalent of malaise? I can’t blame folks for wanting to escape the helpless and stuck feeling. But the problem is that nothing is going to change if everyone disengages and just passively consumes. Didn’t Ray Bradberry hypothesize this exact behavior in Farenheit 451? I don’t particularly want to live in that world, and yet when I look around I fear that I might actually be there.

My current role has also shown me how incredibly mentally fragile people have become. On one occasion I had a really slow day and received no less than two phone calls from two different levels of management to try and offer morale boosts. I was unimpressed to say the least. People are going to say no in the line of work I find myself in. They’re going to say no a lot. I just go find the next one to talk to. It’s all a numbers game, and I truly want to be left alone to work.

I’m sure that this was done in order to encourage retention, and to increase the metrics that lead to bonuses. I’m reasonably certain that experience has taught them that a few hours of unsuccessful attempts will cause the average drone to give up on the job. For the day, permanently, I’m not actually sure which one they are concerned with. Maybe both. But that’s a huge problem! Everything I’ve ever found worth doing is hard, and involves a lot of trial and error before success. If the reaction is to check out at the first sign of adversity and revert to passively consuming media how is anyone ever going to un-stick themselves?

It’s tempting to say “this is what happens when the biggest struggle in your life was when mommy and daddy turned off the Wi-Fi.” But I’m not sure that’s fair and, even if it was fair, it’s not helpful. My software developer brain suggests that we should do an RCA on this issue, and then try some patches. So, where did we go wrong?

I suspect the true answer is a hopelessly tangled web of reasons. Education likely plays a role, as do parents, as does the fundamental nature of the human mind as the tool using monkeys that we are. Doing stuff is hard, and the less stuff we do the less energy we expend. The less energy we expend the less work we have to do trying to make/find more food. If something leads to failure, or a long period of uncertain success, we want to do something else that will produce dopamine. We want the “reward” and we have constructed a world that allows us to punch the “feel good” button in our brain with the least effort possible.

4. What Do?

I write a section like this extremely often. The answer for this section is usually the same. I don’t know. That’s the most frustrating thing to me. It’s the same frustrating inability to work towards a solution that I feel when I spend an afternoon applying for better jobs. But that’s also the reason I write these posts, and this section, trying to give the problem a shape helps me to examine it. I don’t know what to do, I know that the current approaches aren’t working. We can mind whoosh³ though! And maybe in doing so my observations help spark further ideas, in myself or others.

Changing education may help, but extremely smart people have been calling for education reform for as long as I can remember thinking that it might be a heckin great idea. The fact that I’m still asking the same question in 2025 would seem to indicate that we should explore other avenues. We are either unwilling or unable to make productive change there.

Is this a problem that technology can help with? Could we weaponize the scrolling machine for good? I think that Thor of Pirate Software has done a really good job of that in a lot of ways. As a short form content hater since the days of Vines even I appreciate his shorts⁴.

Do we need a new platform? On the one hand competing platforms is a good thing, but on the other hand I’m skeptical, and I’m very tired of talk. I’m interested in action that can better the situation. Khan Academy shook things up by making approachable educational content. But I think we have to help people build the mindset that will consume the educational content over the easy dopamine. There’s already so many great resources to learn things for the motivated (or disciplined) learner.

There’s also an elephant in the room. LLM’s exist and the media machine (social and traditional) is pushing the narrative that a slop summary is just as good as reading a book. There are lots of stories about kids using them to do their homework and avoiding all that learning. Hopefully the AI bubble will pop soon and that will improve the issue, but at this time it’s a significant headwind for any effort to encourage real learning.

NOTE: Since the first draft of this post both Meta and OpenAI have produced an absolute abomination in the form of endless AI generated short form content, and it has done a number on my hope for humanity.

The other issue is getting enough people to agree on the correct course of action to make a meaningful push towards that goal. This may be a chicken and egg type issue, in fact I’m almost certain that it is. If you have any additional ideas please do share them. Or if you’re already doing something to make a meaningful change let me know about that too! I’m very interested in seeing what might already be out there.

The world is broken right now. Everything keeps getting more expensive, everyone is being laid off and struggling for too long to get back to work. People are struggling to even believe that they can better their situation. Brainrot consumes countless hours of our time and may be doing worse things for our minds aside. But nothing will change unless we make it change. I want things to be better, so I’m going to keep trying to make more thoughtful content. At least until I can think of a better idea. What are you going to do?