2025: Rejecting Brain Rot | Mind Matters

“Brain rot” ended up being Oxford’s word of the year for 2024, highlighting how pervasive the mental decay caused by digital media has become in our culture. The screens, with their flitting videos, pictures, garbled verbiage, and algorithmic targeting have become ubiquitous; a subway or airport filled with people ogling at five-inch long blocks of silicon would have been bizarre to behold just twenty years ago. Now, it’s the people without a phone who parents steer their kids away from. It’s almost like having a smartphone is the new social marker telling the world you’re a serious person and not an out-of-touch weirdo!

Toward the beginning of the year last year, I listened to a writer on a podcast who predicted that the whole world was going to be steeped in a “brain fog.” We would all become more dulled and numbed by digital technology, engaged more with the online world than the real one. Soon after that, Jonathan Haidt published The Anxious Generation, authoritatively showing how online life has hampered children’s development and caused so many of us to miss out on experiences that make us human. Christine Rosen, a senior fellow at The American Enterprise Institute, came out with her own book on that very subject titled The Extinction of Experience.

And finally, Oxford vindicated everyone’s suspicions and voted for the dark term “brain rot” as the phrase that most aptly summed up the zeitgeist of 2024.

Can we do any better in 2025?

Resisting the Soul-Shaping Effects of Tech

It’s impossible not to be shaped in some way by these modern, digital technologies. As I continued to cover technology and culture for Mind Matters, this is a reality I wrestle with every day. As an older member of Gen Z, I constantly wrestle with spending too much time on my phone and laptop. More often than I’d like to admit, the phone is the first thing I look at in the morning and the last thing I check before going to sleep at night. The same is statistically true of millions of other Americans, Gen Z or older. The struggle to live in the real world and engage in real conversations, relationships, and experiences is becoming all the more difficult as the digitally mediated technologies become ever-more invasive in the daily fabric of life.

However, that doesn’t mean we can’t collectively start to pave a better way in the new year. Jonathan Haidt’s book alone has made some major policy impacts across the country, with more and more schools going “phone-free” and even churches realizing the need to give the smartphone the boot during services and community gatherings. Reading books is a practice I personally have advocated for, especially this past year. With the prevalence of digital forms of media and communication, reading deeply has become nearly as rare as the dodo bird, perhaps a combination of some cultural change and general burnout from all the screentime, more people will return to more generative forms of leisure like reading novels.

So, in 2025, the Big Tech companies will continue to pitch us their shining goods, AI lords will continue to hype their large language models, and it may just get harder to figure out how to live well alongside the clamor and distraction. Following the data, observing personal experience, and developing another vision for human flourishing, however, can get us a step closer to living a fuller and intentional kind of life.