Every decade or so, adults discover that young people are consuming media that corrupts their minds — and a moral panic ensues. Comic books were going to produce a generation of delinquents. Television would make children into couch potatoes.

Video games and rap music would inspire them to do violent stuff. The internet would keep them shut away in the basement, typing in chat rooms to dangerous strangers. Now the panic surrounds “brain rot” — the state of being entranced by an infinite stream of nonsensical Tik Toks and Instagram reels.

Perhaps you overheard some of these videos this summer. The dancing cappuccinos and singing toilets and muscular fruit. The random bursts of noise and strobe flickers and wild visual effects.

This can’t be good. I research how digital environments shape human behavior. My co-author, Anna Götzfried, and I recently published a study interviewing Gen Z-ers aged 13 to 26 about how they experience brain rot — what these videos mean to them and why they watch them.

What we discovered is a generation that is achingly self-aware of what brain rot is doing to their minds. They are struggling with the social media environment they have been given, and they are searching for a way out. The panic over brain rot assumes that the brain-rot content itself is the problem.

That Gen Z-ers’ engagement with absurd, low-quality videos, because they are young and impressionable, necessarily leads to cognitive decay. Our participants described the inverse: The mental state comes first. After scrolling algorithmically curated feeds long enough, they experience a “brain-rot feeling” — a fogged-out, low-selectivity state in which they simply consume whatever appears.

Brain rot emerged from social media platforms like Tik Tok and You Tube where the amount of attention you attract determines your success. Every piece of content on these platforms competes for the finite attention of users. This competition then pushes everything toward faster, louder, more stimulating but also simpler material.

Simple content wins our attention. The business model of social media treats user focus as a commodity to be extracted and sold. The more time we spend, the more advertising revenue we generate for the owners of the platforms.

This attention economy increases engagement — it does not promote high-quality content. What struck us in our interviews, however, was how clearly Gen Z understood this dynamic. One participant told us: “You’ll watch something anyway, so why not brain rot? It’s actually better than an ad because it doesn’t demand anything from you.” Another argued: “If everything is content now, then brain rot is anti-content.

It’s the only way to be free online, which is to do something so stupid it can’t be monetized."When we spoke to Gen Z-ers about brain rot, we heard sophisticated — if uncomfortable — statements outlining a generation’s response to the cultural conditions and the overbearing information environment it inherited. Like every generation before them, they are making something out of the conditions they were given. In this case, they are participating in deliberate nonsense.

To describe this process, my co-researcher and I introduced the concept of anti-gratification. Traditional media theory, going back to the 1970s, assumes people choose media to satisfy needs: They want information, emotional engagement, social connection, relaxation. But in an environment inundated with content that seeks to monetize your attention under the guise of educating you, entertaining you, motivating you or improving you in some other way, content that proudly offers nothing becomes a relief.

Brain rot breaks the mold of social media through its absurdity, its deliberate refusal of narrative, purpose or message. A century ago, artists responded to the horrors of World War I by creating deliberately irrational, anti-aesthetic work. Dada rejected the cultural l...