Putrescimus Noster Cerebrorum
06/04/2025
Contents
"We rot our brains."
\Introduction
I was walking my dogs the other day. Just a few blocks through my neighborhood, as rain had been forecasted. We were perhaps halfway through when I saw something. A neighbor of mine, whose name I do not know or much care to know, was taking out her garbage. Dear reader, I would not be relaying this to you if it was not without peculiarity, however; as for the entire duration of the chore, her eyes were glued to her phone.
Out the door, garbage in hand.
Eyes on phone.
Opening the receptacle.
Eyes on phone.
Closing the receptacle.
Eyes on phone.
Back inside.
Eyes on phone.
I understand that this may be overly judgmental of me for what may have been an otherwise innocuous observation, though I may note that she was clearly not talking as one might when on a phone call, nor was it up to her ear. It was held right in front of her face. I can only therefore assume that she was engrossed in some form of visual media, be it text, image, or video. Whilst taking out the trash.
Again, I understand that this is a lot to read into a person whom I’ve never formally met or spoken to, but it did get me thinking even more about a problem noticed by an increasing number of people: that being a psychological dependency on the smart phone, reasons behind it, and potential solutions to the greater issue of dopamine burnout and so-called “brain-rot.”
\\hey peter, remember the time?
It feels, simultaneously, that the era of dedicated computer rooms and the "family computer" was both recent and yet almost too distant to recall because of how far removed we are from it these days. I, as an early Gen Z-er, can remember well enough our own shared computer in a dedicated space in the multipurpose back room (we were not so fortunate as to dedicate an entire room for the device). My oldest verifiable memory of a desktop computer was that of a Gateway brand PC running Windows XP, my surety in the veracity of this memory being deeply rooted memories of that cow-print logo and many hours spent in Space Cadet Pinball, the latter's final inclusion in versions of Windows being for XP.
For my most formative years, this would be my only exposure to the internet. If I wanted to log on or browse, it would have to be through that crappy desktop computer. But I liked it. It was just fine for me as a child to spend at most a couple of hours a day on it after school to play flash games based on my favorite cartoons, or to log into the various online worlds which were heavily curated for children, such as pseudo-chatrooms and minigame collections such as Build-A-Bear Workshop's Bearville or U.B. Funkeys or baby's-first-mmos like Toontown or, later, Fusionfall.
At the end of the day, these were products designed to entice children to bug their parents into buying them, like any other toy, but they did serve a very important function on the internet as a whole, which is especially obvious in hindsight. It is no secret that the internet can be a very unsavory place for developing minds. Even though I was spending most of my time on the dedicated children's sites, I too stumbled onto things I most definitely should not have been exposed to on account of being allowed generally unrestricted access to the internet; two examples being a classic SpongeBob SquarePants Saw parody animation (hilarious now in its crudeness), and, more horrifying, what I am now certain was a segment of the Eclipse from the 1997 Berserk anime adaptation, more specifically the rape of Casca—something I had forgotten about, or perhaps repressed, until I had actually gotten into Berserk in high school and the memory came rushing back.
All of this was plainly on YouTube for myself and others my age to find and view. I should consider myself lucky I was not introduced to any of the classic shock sites like bestgore or rotten.com until long after their respective heydays, and I was long past the point of vulnerability to traumatization. This is not to say of course that I was still not exposed to sex and violence, as proven by my experience on YouTube, but those events were exceptions, rather than the rule. For the most part, the computer (and, by extension, the internet) was a tool for creativity and learning, as well as a source of entertainment, but not the source of entertainment. Despite being otherwise unmonitored, I was not allowed to simply be on the device at all hours of the day; something that was far easier to enforce when the only access point to the internet was inexorably tied to a physical location.
And then they put the internet in our pockets.
\\\getting groomed on Flipnote Hatena
One year, I was gifted a Nintendo DSi XL, a device I still have to this day, and which functions perfectly despite its age. More to the point, however, was a particular feature of the console: online connectivity. Besides playing, you know, video games on the DSi, I spent much of my time on the first-party application Flipnote Studio. This was a program that allowed users to animate short clips using their DS screens as a drawing pad and to upload them to the Flipnote Hatena service, sort of like a YouTube specifically for these short animations, complete with a star-based rating system and comments. Where previously I could only access the internet through the family computer, I could now access a much smaller, but no less real version of it wherever and whenever I wanted. And access it I did.
It had gotten to the point where every night before I went to sleep, I would be under my covers, scrolling through the animations for hours. This impacted my quantity and quality of sleep greatly, but I still did it anyway. One night, I had been in a comment thread under a particular flipnote. I do not remember the specifics, but I do remember that it was ERP. I was not exactly participating with the other person, as I was aware enough to know that what they were writing was exceedingly inappropriate to be engaging in, and I reacted as such. Unfortunately for me, this was also the one night my mother caught me staying up. It was one thing to be playing on my console long after I was supposed to be asleep—just about anyone who had one could attest to hiding it beneath their pillow and pretending to be asleep, only for Mario's loud "Bye-Bye!" that played whenever you shut the clamshell while playing NSMB or Mario 64 DS to out them—but her child was talking to a stranger on the internet about things they shouldn't be. Needless to say, I was in an assload of trouble, after which my internet access would be far more locked down, but a certain amount of damage had already been done. Not from the ERP, ironically enough; I never engaged in anything like that since. The one thing that did stick with me was long nights where I would do little else but sit in the dark, illuminated only by the glow of my handheld device, doing nothing but consuming content. This should begin to sound familiar to you.
That addiction to mindlessly scrolling through content hasn't shaken me. Ever since I was allowed to have a smartphone, just about every moment not spent doing something else, something more important, I would pull it out of my pocket and scroll. For years. Even today, I find myself sucked into scrolling twitter or YouTube when I could be doing something productive, and that's perhaps the worst part: I'm preventing myself from doing things I actually want to do. I wasted several hours today as of the writing of this paragraph to this timesink instead of writing this article and maintaining my website. Hell, even videogames are more intellectually stimulating and fun compared to doomscrolling, but there I was, doing it anyway. This is hardly a phenomenon exclusive to myself.
And this is the part where I go "le phone bad" as the boomer newspaper artists so often do.
\\\\the part where he says "le phone bad"
le phone bad.
Erm, hold up, mayhaps they (stinky old people) have had a hecking point all along????
Well, maybe not for the exact reasons they might have thought, and especially not when the older generations are getting increasingly sucked into social media in droves. Here we return to the phenomenon I had observed in the introduction: the internet in your pocket has overwhelmingly affected most demographics, young and old. The algorithms and content feeds have simply become too addictive to ignore. My own dear parents, Gen X-ers, are unable to sit through an episode of television without having their eyes glued to their phone screens, scrolling through TikTok or Instagram or Facebook. So much for all of those warnings for us to not sit too close to the screens.
It should not need to be stated that this is an utterly hollow activity. There is very, *very* little value to be gained from it. It has all the metaphorical nutritional content and addictiveness of a cigarette hit. And for many children, it's all they've ever known. Many kids these days are given an iPad practically the moment they're out of the womb to placate them with meaningless flashing colors and thinly-veiled fetishistic content. The worst part? There's no online alternative. The vast majority of safe online spaces I grew up with have long since vanished in a nameless and largely unnoticed mass extinction event. Network websites like Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network are husks of their former selves, the death of Adobe Flash taking away most of the fun to be had on their sites. Cultivated online worlds like those I spoke of above, and even more beloved places like Club Penguin or Animal Jam have long since shut down or have hemorrhaged users in favor of the handful of large social media sites on account of their ease of use and addictive nature. This means that, for better and especially for worse, young teens and even younger children are sharing online spaces with adults on these useless platforms.
Reading comprehension and attention spans are plummeting. COVID stuck people inside, leaving social media as the only way to connect with others. It was during this time that user numbers for TikTok skyrocketed past one billion concurrent users[1], a significant portion of them assuredly being people under the age of 18, who were not socializing in person, but with the simulacrum of society through their phones. This was especially devastating to kids in their formative years, who rely on interactions with their peers to build social skills and learn how to interact with other human beings; something which has been utterly superseded by one-way parasocial relationships with their favorite content creators, whom additionally function as role models for them. I don't know anybody my age who reads often, myself regrettably included in that. I can only imagine how much more of a slog it must feel for someone half my age to read even a few pages of a novel before closing it. The threat of boredom, of not being stimulated by something non-challenging for even a second more than that still-dwindling attention span allows for. Which, by the way, has dropped from about two and a half minutes in 2004 to forty-seven seconds in 2023[2]. I'd wager that it's dropped even further in the two years since then.
So what the hell do we do? For adults, becoming aware of your own poor habits is the first step. I know that I'm increasingly cognizant of the time I'm wasting on my phone, and I'm making conscious efforts to minimize it. If I pick up my phone to check the weather app, I quickly remind myself to not perform the graven muscle-memory sequence of taps to open the same handful of apps to switch between, and put the damn thing down. I've begun to do this only fairly recently, and I already feel much better; not just in my own self-confidence for beginning to break a bad habit, but in the actual time allotted for me to be doing more productive things, things that I love.
For kids... it's all on the parents. I shall make no false pretenses in my knowledge of raising children, but just about anyone should be able to tell you that a tablet and YouTube is no replacement for parenting. I understand that it must be extremely tempting for tired parents to throw on Cocomelon for just an hour of silence and rest... but can that not be accomplished through other means? Was the average experience of the human child for all of history one of incomprehensible malaise and anguish until the advent of baby sensory videos?
Teach them how to be okay with being bored. How to make your own fun without resorting to dopamine receptor-frying screentime. Books! Fucking give them books! Encourage an early interest in literature and critical thinking! And if they're yet too young to be reading by themselves, read to them. Endure the tantrums and cries when you take away the tablet. You signed up for that when you chose to procreate. Drawing! if they're old enough to hold a crayon without immediately sticking it down their throat and choking on it, let them draw! Encourage creativity and imagination! I'm going fucking crazy!
For my part, I will not be optimizing this site for mobile viewing. In fact, I'm toying with the idea of completely blocking any content from view if it detects that you're on mobile. I am becoming increasingly radicalized by this.