A TikTok scroll at 3 a.m. A surrealist AI crocodile in a bomber jacket narrates absurd Italian-accented nonsense about existential dread. It cuts to dancing potatoes declaring war on productivity. The loop plays on, shared and remixed until dawn, while the comments are flooded with skull emojis and “peak brain rot.”
But it isn’t mindless consumption. The term “brain rot” exploded after the Oxford English Dictionary named it Word of the Year in 2024. By 2026, it has evolved from diagnosis to defiance. Lamented by critics as cognitive decay, brain rot functions as resistance: a gleeful rejection to optimization culture, a communal exhale in a world that demands constant seriousness.
Think of it as punk. Gen Alpha, Gen Z and younger millennials aren’t rotting their brains accidentally. Amid the “great exhaustion” — endless subscriptions, algorithmic demands and economic squeeze, when everything is optimized for engagement — choosing nonsense becomes anti-productive rebellion. Anti-hustle movements, including China’s “rat people” choosing naps over pressure and Gen Z’s no-shopping challenges, mirror the same fatigue.
What critics call mental fog is, for those inside it, a communal ritual. Memes such as calling out “six-seven” exaggerate their own absurdity, inviting every young person to be in on the joke.
Silliness doesn’t solve exhaustion. It survives it, laughs at it, shares it until the heaviness lightens, if only for one scroll.
José Yumar, Athens
My generation is not broken
The May 8 front-page article “College students shun screens in bid to connect” described a generation so lonely that institutions like New York University are building programs — long dinners, phone-free parties, cookie decorating — to give college students a space to connect in person. These programs assume my generation is broken. I’m 16. I’m here to tell you we are not.
Older generations have always misread the next one. Think rock-and-roll. Television. Video games. The internet. Each time, they’ve gotten it wrong.
I see the surveys. They say we’re lonely. We’re depressed like no generation before. But University of Oxford researchers writing in Nature Human Behaviour found screen time explains just 0.4 percent of adolescent well-being. So maybe the phone isn’t the problem. Or maybe we’re just not quite at the point in the technology revolution where we’ve figured out how to make it feel less lonely. But we will get there.
NYU’s dinner parties look lovely. But they serve maybe 300 students at a school of 60,000. Fighting that tide with dinner parties and phone bags seems quaint — like my dad telling me to put my phone away at the dinner table. Thirty minutes later, I’m on it again.
The question these universities should be grappling with isn’t how to take the technology away. It’s how we learn to connect inside of it.
Facebook started as a way to rate college students’ looks. Instagram started as a photo filter app. Neither was designed for human connection. People created it anyway. We are still early in this. As my history teacher says, have some perspective. And some faith in us.
Kate Casciato, New York
Redistricting made E-Z
If last month’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais has revealed anything, it is that the Supreme Court is incapable of delivering electoral equity. Happily, there is a way to elect congressional representatives without the taint of gerrymandering or racism.
The formula is simple: divide the alphabetized population of each state by the number of allotted representatives it has. District 1 may represent Aaron through Arrick, District 2 may include Arronson through Benitez, and so on through Zuckerberg, much like the way a set of encyclopedias is divided.
There is no way to gerrymander the alphabet!
Neither of the two major parties would automatically dominate a district, while the lesser parties would have a more significant seat at the table.
Kelly White, Watauga, Texas
From high opera to unsmooth jazz
Regarding Craig Singleton’s May 19 Tuesday Opinion essay, “Trump misreads how to avoid a Taiwan war”:
John Adams, who composed “Nixon in China,” would likely find no material for grand opera in President Donald Trump’s visit to Beijing. Where President Richard M. Nixon’s historic opening to China created the basis for a global economy and extended an olive branch to one of the world’s oldest and most continuous civilizations, Trump’s state visit was just another chapter in the 47th president’s love affair with autocrats. Nixon’s was a mosaic personality — one that was capable of visionary statesmanship, destructive wars of aggression, advocacy for Native Americans, environmentalism and paranoia-driven criminality. Nixon was a tragic figure but one that, true to Aristotle’s conception of the tragic hero, was able to comprehend that he was the cause of his own downfall. Nixon was capable of introspection; as such, he was the stuff of classical drama.
Trump, by contrast, was in China as a supplicant. Chinese leader Xi Jinping can assist Trump with Iran, but the price may well be the U.S. abandoning Taiwan to the People’s Republic of China. Trump, who has praised Xi’s “iron fist” and lifetime tenure, is a man who would create a grand alliance with a U.S. adversary to solve the problems of his own reckless foreign policies.
As the Trump tariffs and the Iran war — both forms of taxation without representation — bleed American families and the U.S. economy, don’t expect the GOP to abandon its de facto monarch. There will be no senior Republican delegation sent to the White House to persuade Trump to resign; no removal via impeachment or the 25th Amendment. We are in political terra incognita.
Eric Radack, Santa Fe, New Mexico
How to make the sabbath last all week
Regarding Daniella Greenbaum Davis‘s May 14 Thursday Opinion essay, “Forget the digital detox spa retreat. Try this ancient solution.”:
I like the concept of Shabbat as a prescribed weekly day of rest and reflection, and I hope it still works for observant Jews. I question, however, the realism of translating Davis‘s remembered childhood Shabbat into today’s rhythm of a typical American family — even of those families whose members take the time to read Post op-eds.
What works for me and my wife is to take a half-hour or so every day to be really present with ourselves and the world around us, to focus on our purpose, to create an intentional time of stillness, to recharge before going on with our daily routines. Of course, meditation, as some call it, is not a practice that works for everyone. Some might dismiss it as time-wasting navel gazing. But for us, it serves as a daily mini-Shabbat!
Gerald Kamens, Falls Church
Post Opinions wants to know: Are you in a relationship with someone who holds different religious beliefs? If so, how do you make it work? Any upsides or downsides? Send us your response, and it might be published as a letter to the editor. wapo.st/house_of_worship
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