The word for 2024? Brain rot. Totally expected. Totally felt.

I could sense it happening, slowly but surely—my brain decaying under the weight of (anti)social media. Five years of endless scrolling, fragmented thoughts, and dopamine hits designed to keep me addicted. Before that, I loved the person I was. As a literature student, I devoured books, analyzed them with passion, lived in stories longer than a few seconds. But then I started paying more attention to online distractions, to short videos engineered to hook me. And they did.

We now have an attention span shorter than a goldfish’s—five seconds. That’s all you get to grab someone’s interest before they move on, before they swipe, before they forget you exist. Five seconds. What does that mean for books like War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov? What happens to deep thought when the world is designed for quick consumption?

We see people in restaurants scrolling, families glued to their screens while eating, a whole generation unable to sit in silence. And we stop and wonder—is this really making our brains rot? Will we ever again watch a two-hour opera without distraction? Read a 500-page novel without checking notifications? Have a conversation without looking at our phone?

I want to believe the answer is yes. And I want to prove it to myself.

So, I made a choice: I deleted my personal social media. No reels, no stories, no ads, no strangers’ meals, no mindless opinions. No alarms and no surprises, as Radiohead puts it. And it has been a blast. There’s still work to do—anything on a phone can become addictive, even a simple calendar. But I refuse to let my mind rot any further.

The Cure? Look at What’s Eternal.

Turn to nature. To love. To real human connection. To art. To the simple joy of being.

There’s a shift happening, a quiet return to presence, to depth, to things that truly matter.

And I want to be part of it.