Social Media
The buzzword brain rot effect
Emma Aviv '24
Website Designer
From ten year olds buying Drunk Elephant in Sephora to a generational war started by people born in the literal 1900s, we might be losing cultural awareness and becoming the modern day millennial. Except, that is not possible because being insufferable skips generations. No one cares about what Gen X is doing, but people do hyper-fixate on the behaviors of boomers and millennials. After all, it’s the little kids, currently referred to as Gen Alpha, that introduced stupid trends and phrases like skibidi toilet and fanum tax who are making teachers ban griddying in classrooms. We (speaking on behalf of Gen Z) never had anything banned, except rainbow loom, slime, water bottle flipping and fidget spinners.
This new social environment, aka social media, promotes nothing but brain rot. It clearly is NOT because of Gen Z, though. All we are concerned about is whether or not we appeal to the male gaze or the female gaze. We don’t talk about meaningless buzzwords, because all of our terms make sense. After all, it’s important for all of us to be a girl's girl because if you aren’t one, then that clearly means that you hate women and have a lot of internalized misogyny to unlearn.
The words we invented are innovative and entirely practical. We are creating new terms that everyone can 100 percent agree with. For example, if you’re a girl you don’t have hobbies, you have girl hobbies, like going on a “hot girl run.” It is important that we clarify that these things are for girls, like “girl dinner,” because otherwise how would we know?
Either way, it is clearly so unique to girls to only eat macadamia nuts and drink matcha for an entire meal. It isn’t like “boy dinner” that includes a Monster energy drink and steak. We care about our physical and mental well-being. We emphasize having a well balanced diet where we embrace intuitive eating: eating what you want! But we also care about getting our proper daily magnesium glycinate intake and avoid eating sugars because sugars cause all of our modern health problems, not carbs.
An example of how prevalent buzzwords are in Gen Z vocabulary.
And our beauty standards are nothing like the skeletal chic of the 90s and 2000s. We focus on more meaningful standards, like, are you bunny pretty, siren pretty or deer pretty? We, as a generation, also discuss societal and psychological phenomenons more than any other generation before us. I personally have more of an avoidant attachment style than anxious attachment and I think that's because I’d rather rot in bed than focus on all of the ways I can water myself down for someone else.
One could argue that this is because the teenagers of today all grew up with phones and unlimited access to the internet. But that’s also not true because I played on my phone outside when I was younger. I didn’t even get a phone until I was nine years old, a tablet at seven and was on social media at 10.
At least I wasn’t an iPad kid!