Brain Rot and Doom Scrolling: The Gothic Personification of Our Modern-Day Ruins

I was born well into the digital age – let’s leave the exact year a mystery – but grew up with the really fat monitor screens; the Nokia brick phones that lit up with a strange neon yellow-green colour; and those laptops that breathed very heavily thanks to the CD drives for all the bootleg DVDs we bought. I remember thinking that my dad’s Blackberry was extraordinary: Brick Breaker was the culprit of my procrastination as a child. I also, however, did get a touch screen – now known as a smart phone – android around about the age of fourteen. It was a Samsung something or the other that ran out of storage every two days and took photos that I should definitely not have used on my Facebook wall.

Brain-rot was named Oxford Word of the Year 2024. There is a subtle kind of irony there that I can’t quite put my finger on, but would no doubt rouse Mary Shelley’s imagination if she were still alive. The Gothicism of revenge, psychological struggle, trapped doors, and gloomy characters has translated quite strangely and remarkably into what I would call our modern ruins today. Also known as: our digital existence.

See, Poor Things isn’t terrifying because of the macabre beginning to a strange end: it is scary because sometimes we don’t know what’s what. Who is trying to confuse us, who is trying to help, and what on Earth are we supposed to believe? There are about a zillion narratives going on about what to eat in a day to not get fat and math equations flying all over the place on how much protein to consume. When do all these posts, reels, and endless scrolling stop being meaningful and start feeling like space junk floating around in the darkness of our neurons? Bella Baxter wasn’t completely suffering from an under-developed brain when an overload of information – the reality and fantasy of the world – drove her to outbursts. The brain rot we experience is somewhat the fault of the content we watch, but definitely the fault of the information overload we experience. Picture this: a person propped up in bed, their thumbs mechanically moving over a screen minute after minute until it is past midnight; their face brightly lit by a light, yet expressionless, and the endless roll of TikTok videos reflecting in their pupils. Our modern-day gothic story: thought paralysis, lost sensation, and a mind so disconnected it’s just started wandering about the moors like a character from Wuthering Heights. This is the result of our digital existence: our modern-day habits that, quite frankly, would have elicited some creatively creepy storytelling from Lord Byron and Co.

It is fascinating how human habits evolve; both in their speed, and their innate nature. The original content creators that we all worshipped were the YouTubers who gained millions of views by pranking each other, making slime videos, or turning everything you own – including your mother’s hairbrush and your notebooks – into edible somethings. The ‘influencers’ of today hold a far stronger, I feel, chokehold on not just our entertainment, but our thoughts, ideas, and personal lives. The concept of amusement has gone from being a case of learning how to DIY around your house, to watching people unbox hundreds of items worth countless dollars – pounds, rupees, minutes, plants, plastics, effort, carbon dioxide, working days – in the span of twenty minutes. To me, what is slightly more jarring is our general lack of conscious awareness of this fact. It is entertaining, so we are entertained. It is unrealistic, ominous but captivating, alluring, and plays at our imagination. Now, what did we learned from Dracula? Well, if nothing else, it’s that evil is seductive. And that’s not to say that influencers and their brand deals are akin to blood-sucking, porcelain-skin vampires; but the Gothicism of our modern ruins prevail here too.

Let me give you one curious example: discount codes. When an ‘influencer’ on TikTok or Instagram (or… LinkedIn?) give us their precious affiliate code to get a whopping 10% or a thrilling 15% off GymShark or ASOS, what is it that goes through our minds? First of all – and most of the time – there was no ASOS order to begin with: you’ve just gone and added things to your basket because now the 15% off will make up for the delivery costs you didn’t want to pay, for the pair of jeans you weren’t going to buy in the first place. But your favourite TikTok fashion-fluencer said that it was a must-have for the Christmas season, and she made it cheaper for you to get! Then you scroll through dozens of weekly uploads where she unboxes her new Uniqlo and Sephora boxes and all of a sudden there are five different codes and four different things that you must get for your dog, or your husband. Three different ways you can think of to justify spending the money on two different sets of the same item in black and navy (because you can’t get away with only one). And just one reason that the idea was put in your head to start this all: doom-scrolling. If Frankenstein has taught us anything about obsession, it’s that you don’t realise you’re tumbling down a rabbit hole on a path of no return until you are chasing the half-alive-half-dead creature you put together in a lab through the Arctic. In other words, doom-scrolling is Dr. Frankenstein, our digital obsessions are the unlucky body parts that he deemed worthy of experimentation, and our habits are a cumulation comparable to the slightly confused, unrealising, and disoriented creature. 

Alas, we have come back again to the Gothicism of our modern-day habits. Why call it doom-scrolling? What about it is so dooming, destructive, and ruinous? In order to convince myself of just how dooming doom-scrolling is, I started a challenge. To come up for air, I stop and make myself describe the last three reels I’ve scrolled past. You would actually be surprised how difficult some people find this – and it becomes even worse when you add the challenge of recalling things chronologically to the mix. Is this a revelation about attention spans (maybe the lack thereof) or a wake-up call on a scarier phenomenon: how unaware are we of our own present? Let me put it this way: if you just made dinner, sat down at the table, and someone asked you to recount three ingredients (without looking at it), struggling to name them might be slightly embarrassing. Or say you had just read three pages – no, one page – from a book, and someone asked you to tell them three things from that page. Most people, hopefully, would not find these tasks difficult: if you can’t recall what’s going on in a single page of the book, how are you going to manage to read the rest of it? So, why is it that when we are on social media our brains switch-off so effortlessly, and why aren’t we more freaked out by it?

Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, and Percy Shelley, Byron, and the Brontës may not have ever fathomed the technological innovations of today that have led us to all the doom-scrolling and brain-rotting. But they nailed the denouement of narratives when it came to manifestations of human habits in worldly consequences. Gothic, or not, our digital existence that dictates our real-life habits are starting to depict one long story arc that we may be oblivious of the ending to. 

Long story short, however, this is a literary enthusiast’s way of saying that we need to become more in-touch with our own present. I am not one to sit on a high-horse (scrolling on my Pinterest, Instagram, and Substack) and preach about the evils of social media. In fact, social media can be great. My worry is that we often, as humans, get a little bit confused when greatness jumps the line, runs cross-country, and collapses in a field of obsession.