Member-only story

Likes, Memes and Mental Decay

Social Media Addiction Reversing Racial Progress

Jeffrey Kass
ILLUMINATION

--

Group of millennial friends using mobile phones — Young people addiction to technology trends following and chatting with emoji on smartphones — Tech and millennial concept — Focus on bottom hands
Image: Shutterstock/Tint Media

Oxford’s word of the year is “brain rot.”

After a public vote of more than 37,000, this was 2024’s word of choice.

Brain rot is the deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state resulting from overconsumption of online material considered to be trivial or unchallenging.

We’re all aware of the condition.

Check your iPhone’s stat page and it’ll tell you how much screen time you spent in the last day. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

Has yours ever reported 12 hours and 42 minutes in a day?

Estimates suggest that 1 in 5 adults are online more than 40 hours per week.

Nearly half of American teen-agers notch screen time of more than 8 hours per day. And by screen time, we’re not talking about reading the Wall Street Journal or New York Times. Entertainment and social media screen time among children continues rising each year.

It’s obvious to any observer that focus on Instagram and TikTok, and Facebook for us old people, is impacting productivity and causing us to forget more important things.

But it’s also rotting our overall mental capacity.

--

--

Responses (1)