Brainrot But Make It Art.

By Arnav Ghai

You know what hits differently than a well-timed TikTok dance? Brainrot.It sneaks up like a bad habit. You don’t even realize you’re indulging in until you’re deep into a 3-hour scroll of memes and wondering if the world has truly lost its mind or if you’re just the one who’s too far gone.

And let’s be real: you’ve laughed. Like, really laughed. Maybe you shouldn't have, but here we are, consuming chaos like it’s a five-star meal. Between a random dude in a video screaming about a toilet and the occasional “sigma sigma boi” line thrown in for good measure, your brain is essentially on vacation in a place where logic goes to die.

It all starts innocently enough. You’re just scrolling through your feed, not really expecting anything life-changing, but there’s this little buzz of something—a meme, a joke, an inside reference that somehow feels like a private joke between you and the entire internet. Suddenly, you’re deep in the rabbit hole, watching 10-minute compilations of people making absurd videos about skibidi toilets (whatever that is) while you sip your coffee, still wondering if you could pull off a fit like the influencers who make "the glow-up challenge" look effortless. Your original plans to be productive? Gone. Who needs to work when you can learn the origins of an internet craze that has no discernible reason to exist?

And maybe, deep down, you know that this kind of spiraling is... not healthy. But, like, who cares? Brainrot isn’t about making sense—it’s about embracing the nonsense. It's when you start watching a five-minute clip of a guy rapping about "rizzing" up a banana and somehow understanding the appeal. You start using phrases like “good vibes only” ironically, but the joke’s on you because at some point, the irony becomes genuine. Next thing you know, you’re sending your friends the weirdest TikToks with captions like “Perchance” and just waiting for them to look at you like, “What is wrong with you?” And let’s not get started on how everyone you know has somehow become a connoisseur of the most niche internet content. You’ve got friends sending you links to “new conspiracy theories,” on reddit, but they’re not the spooky kind—they’re more like, “Did you know the word 'yeet' is an ancient incantation?” and you’re just sitting there, nodding, like, “Yeah, I totally believe that.”

Brainrot is collective. You’re not just laughing at the havoc. You’re in it. You’ve embraced the spiraling nonsense, and suddenly, you’re one with the weirdness. It’s like the internet has become this huge, malfunctioning circus, and you’re happily sitting in the front row with your cotton candy, watching a guy dressed as a cucumber try to teach a chicken how to dance.

There’s no real "escape" from it either. You start thinking, “I’m going to read a book today,” but the moment you pick one up, you find yourself rewatching the same TikTok video of a cat jumping into a box for the seventh time, and suddenly, your entire brain is like, "Why read when you can just vibe?" The old days of pretending you were too “mature” for all this have long passed. Now, you find comfort in the randomness, in the messiness. Peak internet brainrot is accepting that you’ve been laughing at the same joke for hours—sometimes even days—and you still don’t understand why it’s funny. But, really, isn’t that the point?

And then, just when you think you've reached the limits of your own absurdity, someone throws a “moodboard” of a sleeping cat wearing a beanie and it just clicks. Suddenly, you get it. You’re in on the joke. You’re living the meme life, baby, and honestly? There’s no going back. You’ve learned to embrace the mayhem, and maybe it’s because it’s the only thing that makes sense in a world where skibidi toilets exist and somehow, so do you.

The truth is, brainrot is the art of letting go of any notion of logic or maturity. It’s a self-inflicted rollercoaster that you’ve somehow started enjoying. So, instead of fighting it, you just let go and let the weirdness wash over you. Who needs structure when you’ve got a never-ending loop of nonsense? There’s a kind of peace in the madness, and maybe—just maybe—that’s exactly what we need.