i dont know what to put in there
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AI brainrot, that can be fixed, by not using it.
Nope. We’re fucked.
You can improve your attention span. It just takes putting effort into it.
Some things that will help:
- Stop watching short-form content. Ban yourself from Instagram, Tiktok, and Shorts/Reels on any site.
- Drop off social media as much as possible - check it once a day, for a max of 15 minutes.
- Start reading a book for at least 1 hour at least 3 times a week.
- Read at least one non-fiction book for every 3 fiction books you read.
- Pick up a hobby that requires dedicated focus and practice. Spend your free time doing that instead of doomscrolling.
- Spend 30 minutes a week in a quiet space, meditating.
Everything on this list is great advice, but non fiction books make me want to kill myself. I’ve found one tolerable non fiction. God help me if I ever have to read a biography or self help book again.
I like True Crime. Or how-to’s… learning about a subject. Science is great. An easy source of interesting non-fiction is https://arxiv.org/ . ;-)
Simply put, reading.
Reading has a powerful effect on the brain. It trains it to maintain focus and coherency in thought. It trains the imagination to allow more complex visualization. It trains it to hold more information in working memory. It can be used to add cognitive tools that allow for more advanced/nuanced forms of thinking. It’s a superpower we forgot because someone found a way to take photographs. Go read something. I’m going to go read right now.And not to get political, but I’ve seen a pattern of how the right often demonises many genres of books (even vowing to campaign about book burning), but also never encourage anyone to read, instead they implicitly glorify short form video and brainrot.
For all the issues the left has, reading isn’t one of them, and in numerous areas of leftist politics reading theory is seriously encouraged and deliberated on.
I have a few right wing family members who are multiple times my age, and they struggle at reading, and hence have pretty bad attention spans, almost no critical thinking or analytical skills, and they find short form media very appealing, which acts as a time sink for them rather than doing anything of real interest. For myself, of course I occasionally watch YouTube shorts and Instagram reels, but a lot less than peers and family, partly because I know the health consequences and how much it messes with my mind, but also an even more important fact, reading is many times more enjoyable, since it engages my mind and I can imagine extremely vivid imagery, so why waste it?
I joined a book club earlier this year and have now almost reached my goal of 50 books (mixed audio and physical). Honestly one of the only thing that brings me joy these days.
What I found was good framing is that algorithms push good and shitty content on you because that was shown to hijack your neural pathways like a Skinner Box experiments. If it was only good stuff every time, then you’d watch what you feel like then stop. Because it mixes it up with a random chance of something good coming up, you get addicted to the scrolling in the hopes to find the good video in a pile of shit. The mice did the same, when food came out all the time they’d only push button for food enough to be full, when it was random they spammed the button and ate way more than they needed to.
If you want to watch a 10m video on it, or just the method to slowly recognize and kick the habit if you couldn’t stop cold turkey.
The essence of it is, set a timer for 5 minutes, scroll, then when the timer goes off, stop, put the phone down, ask yourself if you enjoyed your time doing it or not, if there’s anything else you’d rather get up and do. If you feel it was worth it to calm down or you got something out of it and actually want to keep going, set another 5 minute timer and do it again. Just the pause to consciously slow down and ask yourself that will help you limit your scrolling time, and as you brainstorm other ways to spend your time you may find you need to be scrolling less.
My personal method is to try to seek out what I want instead of having an algorithm determine what information I want to seek, and frequently question why something is being recommended to me.
Define “brainrot?” Are you talking in an individual, culturally, as a media genre? It’s a vague term and your idea of it may not match the commenters’ here.
well for example kids consuming “Skibidi Tollet” or any other thing like it or doomscrolling very short content (like 5 to 15 seoconds)
Skibidy Toilet acts as a shibboleth, a marker of in group status. This is similar to 67 in that the internal meaning is not important, the reference identifies the group it applies to and also pushes away those who do not belong. The use of the term brainrot to describe Skibidy Toilet is missing how it is used.
That said, brainrot does exist. Content which only serves to keep you on platform mindlessly consuming with no curation or decisions from you, the viewer. TV has this effect when you just watch because it is on, say flicking through channels, or when the content is specifically built to create emotional investment without payoff or informational gain.
Cable news is a perfect example of it, constantly raising the stakes without ever actually delivering on making you informed and able to react to the news. “If it bleeds, it leads” journalism is all about keeping your attention on the same page the ads are on, waiting with bated breath for the next update to the story. But most stories don’t actually impact you at all. Someone shooting up a school in the USA is a terrible, awful thing. Such a horror that serves no purpose. But is that my business half way around the world? No. That is meaningful to the people in the local area, those who vote in local elections to change policy. It helps nobody for me to see the details of how a shooter planned their killings, not to learn their names or see their faces.
TikTok and similar video platforms have perfected this with the feed. They show videos and measure how much of each video you watch as well as how long you stay on platform per session. They tweak your feed to increase your overall watch time and bit by bit teach you that the next little dopamine hit is just around the corner, just one more video away. This is reflected in YouTube Shorts and other platforms and has been shown to be incredibly effective at keeping people on platform for hours at a time.
So what can we do to reverse/heal brainrot? It seems the best thing is to stop using these platforms. Stop engaging with things that are emotionally engaging but ultimately useless. If you can’t effect it then it is unwise to know too much about it. Knowing there is a war in Ukraine and that Russia is the aggressor is enough to decide whether you should donate money somewhere, so watching videos of people who have been killed in the street is not going to make your donation more effective, nor will it change your decision. Know enough to make a choice about sonething then move on. Learn about your political positions enough to vote correctly then find out who is a good candidate in your area and vote. Learn which groups are being oppressed most and decide what you will do about it, but don’t get dragged down by how bad everything is. Knowing it is sufficiently bad to demand action is not only enough, it is the limit of what you should consume.
Next find engaging things that take concerted focus and time. Ideally they would be things that build gradually, like a skill or a story. Try to avoid things with the red flags of dopamine hacking, so loot boxes, flashy level ups, random drops, and so on. If you can make a comparison to gambling it is a warning sign. Go for longer, slower things. Ideally make something, like with knitting, 3D printing, or cooking.
I would also recommend using RSS feeds to simplify your intake of news and so on. Find reasonable sources and get their feeds for the topics you care about and put them into a feed reader. Have it set to update once per day, but no more. This puts a cap on the news the same way an old school newspaper did, by giving you a current snapshot fixed in time with no further minute by minute updates. Measure how long you spend reading feeds per day after a week or two and decide if you are happy with that. If you aren’t remove the feeds you get the least from.
But by bit this slows things down and kills the brainrot, returning your attention span and helping you reclaim your peace.
That still doesn’t narrow it down to the part you’re asking about: the person consuming, the content itself, or the culture around it?
Keep in mind older generations also had their mindless content (YouTube poop from the early-mid aughts), so associating silly kid humor with a cultural “problem” may be an overgeneralization.
to narrow it down a bit more: i am talking about short form content (such as shorts, tiktoks and more) not the culture but like the ultra short content
and i am talking about the content itself and also i am not talking about humor but like the effects of short content making us or me or you having lower attention spans
Thank you, that clarifies it.
I don’t think we can necessarily stop the production of the content itself, but being one drop in a bucket of consciously avoiding it (much easier said than done) can add up if you act as an encouraging example.
Prioritize long form media; watch movies and read books. Watch only 10-15+ minute YouTube videos, and overall choose your intake with intent. Even long-form articles and essays count.
In terms of making that switch: unplugging and giving your brain some rest can help - taking in so much short-form can drain your mental battery more than you realize. Passive overstimulation from constant media drip adds up. Give yourself time between episodes/movies/what have you to let yourself digest and process what you watched, and take some time to reflect on what you liked and didn’t like about each thing. You don’t have to write it down, but you’d be surprised what the breathing room does in terms of sparking your own thoughts and opinions as well 😄 /gen /pos
I’m gonna push back on your characterization of Skibidi Toilet. I got curious and watched like, 60 episodes, and it’s a surprisingly moving series about solidarity and sacrifice. Some of the action sequences are pretty high quality, and the fact that it has basically no dialogue means that it transcends language barriers.
I hate to say it, but Skibidi Toilet is a sincerely good piece of media.
Ok but our generation had plenty of brainrot stuff like “badger badger badger”
Badger badger was a complete song that never ended, the opposite of short form content brain rot fodder.
Brainrot is inherently short form? I just thought it was some nonsense gibberish the creator had rolling around in their head that breaks rules about how content works.
You replied to a comment about short form brain rot with an example that was the opposite of what they were talking about and I pointed out it wasn’t what they were talking about.
Brain rot can be any length. Badger badger is not brain rot.
Maybe I’m the one with brain rot…
No, it’s just the modern equivalent of flipping through the TV channels and never staying on anything.
Your question is very vague so I’m just gonna leave some words here that might touch on it.
Rather than just focusing on the media or content I’d worry strongly about peoples ability to tolerate boredom. As an older person I grew up without the means of filling every dull moment with a screen.
I look after children regularly and I focus strongly on their perception of boredom. Rather than giving them a screen when they fail to find something to do we sit together in silence. I explain that being bored doesn’t hurt or doesn’t make us sad or angry. I also explain that it helps to charge our mind so that doing things we like is more fun once we get to it.
I expect an explosion in mental health problems in future generations just because of the lack of time people give themselves to sit with their thoughts (without it being forced upon them).
The type of media, specifically short form content is just exasperating these issues but the onus is on parents and guardians to teach how to deal with it.
Maybe I’ve missed your point but thanks for letting me ramble.
Is the crux of this question that you’re trying to increase your attention span?
Others have given good recommendations of long-form content to try, I’d also go as far as encouraging you to see how long you can go without a specific form of short-form content.
For example if you’re a daily TikTok user, are you able to go one week without both using TikTok or replacing it with another, similar form of media?
This is a practice I apply to most things I enjoy. Periodically I’ll take a break for a designated amount of time and evaluate whether my relationship with this thing is healthy.
yes i mean that
Yes, read books, watch documentaries.
thanks
Start by deleting social media from your phone, make it so it’s really inconvenient to get in there.
If you can’t afford to close your accounts then log out of the web brower’s websites and change the password to something randomly generated that you only have on your computer so you can only log in there when needed. You can still access the chats using something like Beeper.Find things to replace the doomscrolling with. Short simple games that actually help your brain like Tetris, Sudoku, and/or word games - I’ve been really enjoying Blossom Word Search, it’s really calming and satisfying.
Get books that are about topics you care about or enjoy, doesn’t matter how good they are or if they provide any actual value… reading books will help you regain your attention span and reading comprehension skills while keeping you away from screens. You can set tiny goals like reading two pages without getting distracted and then grow it to 5, a chapter, and so on. Put your phone on do not disturb while you read or leave it in another room. Visit your local library, they’re free!
Physical excercise will do wonders for your brain too. I personally love rope climbing in a gym and recently started doing parkour too. It’s a fun way of excercising and building community. Find a sport that calls to you and start by doing it one time a week, even if you suck, we all start somewhere. It’s much easier if you join other people already doing it, look for local groups that practice it. You don’t have to step foot in a regular boring gym.
Anything you do start with small achievable goals and then build them up as that becomes easier. If you get distracted or start going back into old habits it’s ok, just stop and get back to it as you catch yourself. Eventually it’ll become easier.
Oh and do not use LLMs to get answers. Use a search engine like Duck Duck Go with AI turned off. Researching skills are super important and LLMs can really liquify your brain, they take away your creativity and critical thinking skills.
Human brains are pretty quick to adapt. If one day all that short form brain rot content ceases to exist, I’m sure people will be able to recover in a couple months. The attention and energy will just be redirected to something else, hopefully better and more enriching.
Somehow, the boomers and Xers survived TV. Somehow, Millennials survived the internet, social media, and cellphones. GenZ will overcome chatbots; the kids are alright.
What exactly is brain rot? And why do you want to fix it?
No. No kind of rot can be fixed.
