How Do We Combat Brain Rot? Heed Thoreau’s Advice to Live More Deliberately

The Oxford Word of 2024 was declared to be ‘brain rot.’ What actionable solutions does a 19th-century hermit offer us to curb this modern social contagion?

Image generated using Canva from the prompt Henry David Thoreau sitting at Walden Pond on iPhone.

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

-Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

Solving the problem of “brain rot” seems to me … a no-brainer. The obvious answer is: Put the phone down and live the life that’s already in front of you. I do not mean to appear snide or minimize what, for some, is a real and present problem of addiction to social media. I’ve been there—fully immersed in this compulsion of endlessly scrolling in the void of triviality. My time online has consumed far more hours of my life than I am willing to admit but I eventually discovered a healthier balance and I think it is related to heeding some advice I learned from Thoreau long ago. That said, I suspect the problem of brain rot is an issue most of us already know how to solve and it begins by reclaiming our intentionality.

The Oxford Word of the Year describes a phenomenon of saturating one’s mind with banal social media content. The president of Oxford Languages, Casper Grathwohl, defined ‘brain rot’ as “the deterioration of a person’s mental state due to overconsumption of a lot of low-quality material and content.” Like steeping your brain in a vat of salt, all attention and nourishment becomes sapped the longer we gestate online. We’ve stereotyped today’s teens to be the primary victims and purveyors of this trend, but we see this spectacle plaguing many of our closest friends and family members regardless of age. Far too many of us have an unhealthy relationship with the digital world. And yet curiously, ‘brain rot’ is a term that long precedes social media and the internet.

The phrase harkens back to the 19^th century when the philosopher and naturalist Henry David Thoreau coined the term ‘brain rot’ in 1854. Thoreau famously exemplified a life of simplicity, introspection, and taking an interest in our immediate surroundings. He had plenty of time for deep reflection as he spent exactly two years, two months, and two days living in a one-room cabin at Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, and archived the experience in his book Walden; or, Life in the Woods. With no one being tethered to their phones, what kind of brain rot was plaguing people in the middle of the 1800s?

This is an interesting leap to tie Thoreau’s concept of ‘brain rot’ to a modern social ailment. Our digital world would have struck him as utterly foreign and bewildering, no doubt. As someone who studied a lot of Throeau in my formative years, I think I can help close this gap. Thoreau was somewhat of a proto-social and political scientist. Though he momentarily lived a hermit-like existence, he cared deeply about the larger problems ailing society and the role of the individual. He suspected that what was at the root of many social problems was a contagion-like suppression of our innate curiosity and that the antidote was to immerse oneself in nature and appreciate the deeper messages available to us in our immediate environments. Professor Cristin Ellis at the University of Mississippi describes his outlook well,

For Thoreau, ‘brain-rot’ describes what happens to our minds and spirits when we suppress our innate instincts for curiosity and wonder and instead resign ourselves to the unreflective habits we observe all around us—habits of fitting in, getting by, chasing profits, chatting about the latest news…Thoreau really values direct experience over our habits of consuming other peoples' ideas at second hand. He wants us to go outside to feel and think something for ourselves; he wants us to get to know the places where we actually live.

Thoreau and his fellow transcendentalists of the 19th century were familiar with the Bhagavad Gita and other well-known Hindu texts. One of the primary motifs of these religious texts and the transcendentalists' ideas was an emphasis on the natural world, which they viewed with divine reverence. Thoreau's primary goal was to prioritize communing with nature—today, we might say “centering ourselves” or “living in the present,” which is the common focus and parlance of modern mindfulness and yoga practices.

For Thoreau, his entire existence stemmed from direct experiences and cultivating a deliberate life, not unlike Socrates who famously opined that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” His famed passage from Walden echoes this urge to live intentionally,

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

A simple antidote to today’s ‘brain rot’ that I suspect Thoeau would offer us is to adopt our own version of “getting back to basics” and improve how we prioritize our time and attention. This is something I’ve reflected on a lot in my writing and most recently in The Flâneur and the Freedom to Walk (also see the affiliated articles at the end of that post). We must recognize some hard truths about what it means to live deliberately.

When it comes to real success and living a meaningful life, instant gratification is an illusion. There are few shortcuts in life and deeply understanding most fields of study and acquiring wisdom takes a lifetime of engaging with diverse experiences and honing a skill set. This is the value we derive from learning how to slow down in a fast-paced society because it allows us to initially take account of what matters and the goals we can set for our future well-being. Most of us are not born into luxurious lifestyles full of financial stability and plenty of free time to while away our hours nor are we provided with inherent talents or have immediate access to the tools of success. We have to work hard and everything is built on savviness and grit over time–recognizing that success is a persistent and cumulative act. As Louis Pasteur eloquently said,

Chance favors the prepared mind.

We have to learn how to reclaim our intentionality. Being an intentional person means taking an active role in our lives. That might sound cheap and hacky at first because it sounds like we’re being led like puppets on strings and are devoid of free will. Are we not, after all, the authors of our own thoughts and actions? What does it mean to live a deliberate life?

The good news is that we all already know what it is like to live a deliberate life because that is what children do. As children, we once saw the world exclusively through a lens of purpose, curiosity, and unconstrained vitality. How do we return to that mindset? Can we return to that mindset?

Now, I am no social psychologist, nor am I a Zen master of perfect living. However, in recent years I have found better ways to reset my brain and discover a healthier balance with my social media consumption. I’ve learned a great deal about reclaiming intentionally by practicing mindfulness which I’ve actively studied and practiced for over six years. But I’ve also coupled this training with focusing attention on things I’ve discovered to bring my life value and meaning. I’ve constructed a lifestyle that privileges things I know to enhance well-being: travel, reading, writing, growing a family and maintaining relationships, and participating in physical activities like running, hiking, backpacking, and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

These things work together to prevent me from succumbing to brain rot and other self-sabotaging habits. They minimize the time I’d otherwise likely spend scrolling social media and aid in cementing my weekly, monthly, and yearly routines, which require deliberate planning and goal-setting. They provide important structure and meaning that I can feel enhancing my life. Indeed, this fits into what I’ve termed the “equation of the good life.”

Yet all of these things are rooted in what I learned from Thoreau all those years ago. The works of Thoreau were some of the very first books I added to my bookshelf as a teenager and I took his work very seriously. I would hike up into the woods every day after school with a backpack filled with nothing but some water, snacks, and a copy of Walden and the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson to meditate on. Though it may be embarrassing to admit, I was a sort of transcendentalist zealot for a while and even carved many of Thoreau and Emerson’s famous quotes into a beech tree as a way to memorize a long list of insightful phrases.

Now, I do not pretend to have everything worked out perfectly and, there is obviously irony in all this given that I’m writing this on yet another social media site. I still spend anywhere from two to three hours a day on my phone according to my user stats. But the thing is, I don’t feel much of that time is wasted like I used to and I believe it’s because I’ve found a way to moderate my time and devote it to worthwhile content. While I think many of us are adapting to these major technological changes, we have to be diligent to assert our intentionality as these changes work to disrupt our lives.

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to combating and overcoming brain rot, but that’s good news because there are many small, actionable changes we can all choose to make. Once we realize and accept that we have a problem, I believe it's a relatively easy fix.

On average, children and adolescents between the ages of 8-18 spend nearly 7.5 hours a day using one or more types of media (video games, television, cell phones). At the 2017 TED conference, NYU psychologist Adam Alter warned of the negative consequences of screen use and demonstrated how, over the prior decade since the release of the iPhone, our attention to screens increased while our happiness declined quite profoundly.

We are robbing ourselves and our children of invaluable free time during critical moments of their development. These are all choices we are making with little intentionality or forethought to the negative tradeoffs.

Most of what mindfulness practice is trying to get us to do is to learn how not to be distracted–both by the external world around us and by our internal thoughts and emotions—that is it in a nutshell. We can actively control things that lead to distractions and negative emotions. We can take small steps like deleting unnecessary apps, turning off notifications, scheduling when we do not want to be disturbed, and improving our sleep patterns. Innumerable modifications can be made to our daily habits to fine-tune them for living more deliberately.

We can also bring ourselves back to the present by recognizing we have the freedom to wander, explore, and become enchanted by what is already right in front of us. As stated in Wandering and Mindfulness: On the Right to Slow Down

[M]aybe we don’t always need some far-flung expensive tour around the world to bring us greater contentment in our lives. Many of us wish we could travel more than we do, but learning how to appreciate smaller acts of wandering and mindfulness may be more empowering than we first realize. Applying mindfulness to the wanderings that are accessible right out our back door or in our own neighborhoods is what most of us have control over and can do to live a more adventurous and fulfilling life. How do we remain enchanted by the places where we’ll spend most of our time? Is it possible that we can see these mundane places we’ve lived in for ten or twenty years with fresh eyes and explore them as if we’re just now visiting them for the first time?

As parents of a three-year-old, my wife and I are already having lengthy discussions about how to prevent our child from being yet another adolescent zombie staring at a screen. We recognize that the responsibility lies with us on how much exposure we give to screens and online content. We want to do our best to set our children up for success and the best we can think of is to keep their attention, curiosity, and energy grounded in an intentional life largely untethered from digital addictions that can lure us in like moths to a flame.

While building a one-room cabin in the woods like Thoreau and living a life of simplicity has always been a dream of mine, I know that isn’t happening any time soon. But I learned years ago how to make moderate tweaks to my habits and behavior that accumulate over time. We’re all on different journeys in our lives and reclaiming our intentionality is going to vary for each of us. However, we do not all need to continue “leading lives of quiet desperation” as Thoreau once lamented of those of us succumbing to brain rot. We all can begin by reclaiming our intentionality at any time we want.

For consideration:

• How do you recommend we combat brain rot?

• How have you learned to reclaim intentionality and live a more deliberate life?

The runner-up images of Thoreau leading his life of quiet desperation also generated from the same Canva AI prompt.

Thanks for being a fellow traveler with me through this read. Much more to follow.

Cheers!

-JSB