An Encouraging Note for the New Year

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Happy New Year, folks!

As we step into 2025, you may be busy with your subscription to the gym, your resolutions for the new year or your party schedules. As for me, I am singing a different tune. I invite you to have a little flashback of the year gone by. 

As we all chirp on about the hope and the new resolutions to work on for this year, let's have a look on the phenomenon of the previous year, the morbid reality of this year and years to come. Ladies and gentlemen, I am talking about the Word of the Year 2024 - Brain Rot! 

Image credit: Pixabay

Oxford announced the word 'brain rot' as the word of the year - an apt dedication for 2024. Please bear with me as your brain absorbs this information for a fraction of a second and then you can go back to scrolling Instagram. 

Described as a degradation of our mental and intellectual prowess owing to overstimulation by seemingly trivial or unchallenging content, brain rot is actually much more dangerous than it sounds. It is a gateway to slow brainwashing and a stunted growth development. 

In this era of "doom-scrolling", the word 'brain rot' perfectly sums up the past year. I recently saw a meme which said "I wonder how many miles my thumb has scrolled through the year". I thought it was so profound. It managed to sum up the source of my anxiety ever so succinctly. I smiled at the sheer brilliance of it. Then I scrolled on to the next YouTube short of a cat falling down the stairs. 

I am pretty sure that most people who click on this link will fail to read the whole blog post and merely scroll their screens just to assess the length of this write-up, only to return to consume more and more of short-lived content. I won't take it personally. But keep in mind, that your tendency to scroll through your phone is slowly deteriorating your gray matter without any notice period.  

Thanks to the mountain of data waiting to be accessed on the Internet, our minds have been subjected to a barrage of cognitive overload, leading to shrinking attention span and instant gratification. With every scroll that takes you to a new reel, your mind is now a monkey on heroine - excited for the next bout of dopamine rush, hoping for the next reel or short to be more invigorating than the last. 

Brain rot is not only associated with reduced attention span but is closely related to digital dementia and structural brain changes. It is not only dissociating you from your own self, but slowly taking charge of who you become. My dear reader, you  become a guinea pig in this experimental virtual reality. 

The Paradox of Choice is a real thing. When you have too many choices at hand, your mind gets confused. So, in a way, having too many choices at your disposal isn't liberating. It becomes a curse. This psychological principle, originally attributed to economic habits, applies to our daily habits as well. Our brain has been presented with too many interesting choices to keep our basal ganglia occupied while allowing our prefrontal cortex to take a snooze. But, let's face it, our prefrontal cortex is pretty much hibernating at this point of time. 

This post is a rant. I do not intend to offer any solution to this problem for one simple reason: 

Do you really care?

As for me, I am already on the lookout for the word that can sum up this new year. Given my penchant for dystopia, I believe it will be something similar to brain rot. Perhaps, it would be digital dementia or doom-scrolling or some new word. Nevertheless, I know where I'll be placing the bet. 

Would you care to disagree and raise the stakes?


Happy New Year and thanks for reading! 


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