Every decade or so, adults discover that young people are consuming media that corrupts their minds — and a moral panic ensues. Comic books were going to produce a generation of delinquents. Television would make children into couch potatoes. Video games and rap music would inspire them to do violent stuff. The internet would keep them shut away in the basement, typing in chat rooms to dangerous strangers.

Now the panic surrounds “brain rot” — the state of being entranced by an infinite stream of nonsensical TikToks and Instagram reels. Perhaps you overheard some of these videos this summer. The dancing cappuccinos and singing toilets and muscular fruit. The random bursts of noise and strobe flickers and wild visual effects. This can’t be good.

I research how digital environments shape human behavior. My co-author, Anna Götzfried, and I recently published a study interviewing Gen Z-ers aged 13 to 26 about how they experience brain rot — what these videos mean to them and why they watch them. What we discovered is a generation that is achingly self-aware of what brain rot is doing to their minds. They are struggling with the social media environment they have been given, and they are searching for a way out.

The panic over brain rot assumes that the brain-rot content itself is the problem. That Gen Z-ers’ engagement with absurd, low-quality videos, because they are young and impressionable, necessarily leads to cognitive decay. Our participants described the inverse: The mental state comes first. After scrolling algorithmically curated feeds long enough, they experience a “brain-rot feeling” — a fogged-out, low-selectivity state in which they simply consume whatever appears.

Brain rot emerged from social media platforms like TikTok and YouTube where the amount of attention you attract determines your success. Every piece of content on these platforms competes for the finite attention of users. This competition then pushes everything toward faster, louder, more stimulating but also simpler material. Simple content wins our attention.

The business model of social media treats user focus as a commodity to be extracted and sold. The more time we spend, the more advertising revenue we generate for the owners of the platforms. This attention economy increases engagement — it does not promote high-quality content.

What struck us in our interviews, however, was how clearly Gen Z understood this dynamic. (The interviews are anonymous, following social science conventions.) One participant told us: “You’ll watch something anyway, so why not brain rot? It’s actually better than an ad because it doesn’t demand anything from you.” Another argued: “If everything is content now, then brain rot is anti-content. It’s the only way to be free online, which is to do something so stupid it can’t be monetized.”

When we spoke to Gen Z-ers about brain rot, we heard sophisticated — if uncomfortable — statements outlining a generation’s response to the cultural conditions and the overbearing information environment it inherited. Like every generation before them, they are making something out of the conditions they were given. In this case, they are participating in deliberate nonsense.

To describe this process, my co-researcher and I introduced the concept of anti-gratification. Traditional media theory, going back to the 1970s, assumes people choose media to satisfy needs: They want information, emotional engagement, social connection, relaxation. But in an environment inundated with content that seeks to monetize your attention under the guise of educating you, entertaining you, motivating you or improving you in some other way, content that proudly offers nothing becomes a relief.

Brain rot breaks the mold of social media through its absurdity, its deliberate refusal of narrative, purpose or message. A century ago, artists responded to the horrors of World War I by creating deliberately irrational, anti-aesthetic work. Dada rejected the cultural logic that had led to industrialized killing.

In its own meme-driven way, brain rot refuses to participate in the attention economy on that economy’s terms. The joke is that there is no joke. The meaning is that there is no meaning. And for a generation that grew up with its every digital interaction tracked, measured and monetized, that refusal is experienced as a form of honesty in a dishonest system.

Our participants explicitly told us that because brain-rot content is visibly fake and/or A.I.-generated, it feels less exploitative than polished influencer posts pretending to be candid. “Everyone knows it’s generated,” one participant said, “so it feels less manipulative than posts that act like they’re just normal life.” When the simulation admits it is a simulation, it becomes more trustworthy than content that pretends to be real.

By no means do I seek to romanticize brain rot. Our findings were marked by profound ambivalence. The same participants who described brain rot as liberating also described feeling drained and guilty, and referred to the practice of watching until they fell asleep as “death scroll.”

One told us, “I’m scared I won’t find something I’m actually good at mainly because I don’t really have any hobbies. I guess brain rot is my hobby. Also, there is no more time during the day once you start watching.” Another broadly commented on her peers’ viewing behaviors: “They know it’s not good for them, but it gives that little hit and escape. And you just kind of ride it out, like the same way you do with any other vice.”

This ambivalence communicates the emotional register of people living inside a system they cannot escape. They see the manipulation, understand what the algorithms are doing. But they keep scrolling anyway, because they cannot imagine a life outside this system; most of them never lived one.

Consequently, nearly every one of the Gen Z-ers we spoke to explicitly asked for systemic, top-down change to social media platforms. Not through self-control apps or screen-time reminders but through the only mechanism they believe could work: regulation. One participant drew a direct parallel to tobacco: “Before the government regulated the tobacco industry, everyone was smoking, even though they knew it was bad. Because the environment encouraged and allowed for that to happen. Yeah, the doctors would smoke. Now we need to get into a state where the environment shifts so young people’s habits shift.”

The real story here is obscured by the moral panic. Brain rot is not evidence that young people are getting stupider. It is evidence that the attention economy is working exactly as designed, and that the people most immersed in it can see this more clearly than the people watching from the outside.

Brain rot is the collective recognition of a shared cognitive state; we have all been through the same algorithmic meat grinder. “The humor is deeply tied to feeling like you are part of an inside joke,” as one participant put it. “Brain rot gives you the sense that you’re in on something.” Repetitive catchphrases from brain-rot videos migrate out of digital spaces and into offline conversation, becoming part of everyday speech, without anyone’s “even understanding what those terms really mean.”

In this way, brain rot functions like slang: meaningless to outsiders, rich with social significance to those inside. Outsiders look at videos of singing toilets or a chimpanzee-banana hybrid set to a looping audio track and see cognitive decline. Those who have experienced brain rot see in-group membership and a brief reprieve from a media environment that otherwise demands something of them at every turn.

During the Great Depression, Donald Duck, a character who constantly failed at everything, offered millions of people emotional relief by turning their social conditions into comedy. Brain rot similarly channels the collective mood of Gen Z. The key difference is that Donald Duck was a corporate product pushed from above and brain rot is user-generated, spread through memes. This gives it a grass-roots authenticity that traditional media cannot replicate, even as the platforms hosting it remain corporate.

This leads us to the central problem we have encountered in our research: The paradox of anti-gratification is that it remains embedded within the boundaries of the system it opposes. Brain-rot content still generates engagement metrics, feeds data to algorithms and may make money for its creators, ultimately keeping users on a platform. Sure, the livelihood of human influencers may be affected as the sponsored content they put out loses market share, but the platforms continue to harvest user attention without any threat to their business model. I should also note here that stuffed toys and other merchandise based on brain-rot characters are widely available and in demand. Gen Z’s sense of rebellion through watching nonsense is sincere. Whether it is effective is a different question.

Henry David Thoreau is credited with first using the phrase “brain-rot” in “Walden” to critique traditional society’s suppression of curiosity, which he thought gave rise to simplistic, shallow thinking. Today’s suppression comes from an infrastructure so pervasive and so well designed that the people living inside it can describe its mechanisms in detail and still not escape them.

We should be worried. But not about our kids or the content they produce and consume. We should be worried about the infrastructure of social media that has made sustained, focused attention — the very capacity required for individual growth, deep personal connection and societal participation — feel unattainable for an entire generation. Instead of debating whether teenagers are ruining their brains with Ballerina Cappuccina, we should be asking why the world’s most sophisticated technology companies are systematically optimizing for cognitive depletion to harvest our attention.

To treat brain rot, we need to treat the infrastructure problem it lays bare. Platforms could measure success not by time spent, but by users feeling their time was spent well. They could endeavor to make algorithmic decision-making more transparent rather than more opaque. When they recognize that users have entered states of cognitive depletion, they could design for relief rather than exploiting them for additional engagement. They could allow groups of users to support each other with sticking to their social media times, rather than isolating the individual against an algorithm designed to blow past any limits. None of this is technically difficult, but it is commercially inconvenient. And that is why it will not happen voluntarily.

In my more than a decade of research on technology distraction, not one participant has ever reported spending too much time on a device using maps, checking the weather or Shazaming songs. We all know where the problem lies. Gen Z is behaving as expected by the system we have put them in. Brain rot is a cry for help.

Maxi Heitmayer is an assistant professor at Rowan University who studies technology distraction, attention economics and digital culture.

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