BrainROT, REELationships, and The DM Verse

Think of social media as making soup. Most users are stirring the pot. Some users are adding ingredients. The pot stirrers effectively keep social media alive – they are the likes, shares, and saves. The ingredients are publically visible comments, posts, and effortful content. What happens in DMs slowly spreads; the micro universes in DMs spawn and merge with the soup.

First, let’s quickly look at 3 concepts that will put the article in context.

Active social media use: People actively interact with other people on social media. Users take action beyond the basic like & share and create something on social media.

Passive social media use: The majority of social media activity is scrolling through feeds and consuming content.

The DM verse: A place where REELationships take place. DMs are a sub-terranean social media that is restricted to groups or individual DMs and highly active for sharing content. Most of the interpersonal activity happens there. It appears as passive social media use from the outside but is a subculture from the inside. More recent social media behaviors trend toward private engagement in the DM verse, but it uses public content, so it is the fuel that creates engagement for those who use social media actively (content creators).

Users have the option of being active in the DM verse, active in the social verse, or passive in either.

Traditionally, psychology has looked at mental health from this active vs. passive use. But 2 modern phenomena have broken the utility of that classification – REELationships and brain rot – they are “passively active” social media behaviors where the nature of effort and activity has shifted from just posting & liking content to shaping a communal space. I am also highlighting The DM Verse as a separate concept because it has dominion over us.

Doomscrolling & BrainROT

COVID-19 gave us a new habit – doomscrolling. But legends will say they did this before doomscrolling was even a word. Most of the news was bad, depressing, or outright KMN vibes, and we scrolled through it endlessly. This habit is unique because one would think we would be wise enough to ignore the bad news. Humans generally avoid pain, but not here. But what happens when that’s all there is to view? Content that generated negative emotions didn’t make us ignore the content. Instead, the constant presence of negative emotions made it relatable and familiar. It became a source of engagement and bonding in an otherwise bland, locked-down life. That arousal of negative news kept us mentally stimulated. Thus started the doomscrolling era. But, the engagement had consequences – our brains got populated with negative emotions, and that fueled anxiety & stress. The engagement on social media was a reward that encouraged, not discouraged, seeking negative emotions.

This habit is mostly a passive form of social media use that stuck around and shaped everyday life.

I’m not saying this is a direct cause for what came next, but it, at the very least, set the groundwork.

The newest – brain rot – is a consequence of endless passive social media use. Brain rot is a deterioration of our emotional and intellectual capacity through overconsumption of increasingly weird, absurd, silly, unchallenging, or flat-out ridiculous content. Brain rot, unlike the word suggests, is very, very alive & flourishing. Brain rotting begins with consuming slightly absurd content that shapes our minds, and we proceed to consume more weird content and dramatically change our thinking. It’s a mutual deterioration of how we think and what we consume. (This is also happening with the AI-human relationship. I call it the “AI symbiotic crisis“)

As per the soup metaphor, brain rot occurs when the ingredients and stirrers become friends and mutually make the soup lose its original taste and become something uniquely non-sensical and still lovable.

Yet, the brainrot experience is a rewarding one. Just like doom-scrolling offered us relatability during a crisis, brain rot now offers us a disconnection from reality into a fantasy land. Doomscrolling locked individuals into negative cycles. Brain rot, by contrast, is communal – spreading absurdity for shared amusement. The reward of brain rotting is novelty and unique forms of entertainment, all with minimal cognitive effort.

And that may be the key – minimal cognitive effort. Doomscrolling was a problem created by negative emotions in our feeds/FYPs. But brain rotting is a solution to negative emotions like stress and being tired due to high cognitive effort in other domains of life like work. And, the solution is a self-perpetuating cycle of 1 brain rot leading to more brain rot until we all become orange cats with 1 brain cell to share.

Brain rot is a 3-stage reward.

1. The brain-rot content is creatively unique and very easy to consume. It is relaxing and creates positive emotions.
2. The brain-rot is shareable because it is built on highly relatable ideas or relatable events. Like the OIIAII cat.
3. The brain-rot makes consuming newer brain-rot easier because it happens through the familiarity of public comments and popular content. So, future brain rot is like leveling up the reward.

First, we had 2 brain cells. You may know the meme: “My last 2 brain cells”. It indicates a state of total fatigue and being overspent. Like an autopilot filter-less mode where no cognition is used to restrain nor develop a thought. Like while studying for an exam and not knowing anything relevant.

Now, we all share 1 brain cell. Either we’ve already spent all of our mental energy, or we no longer have any capacity to store mental energy.

2 brain cells per person to 1 brain cell shared between all of us. Accurate.

It’s as if we’re zombified and controlled by this god.

Here’s the proof. It took me a while to realize I was searching for a meme on Google Scholar.

For a second, use the last 2 brain cells to entertain this idea. The IDEA of last 2 brain cells being happy or sad, or brain rot setting in by sharing 1 brain cell with everyone highlights the underlying emotion: of being fully consumed. It indicates a reduction of total mental or physical capacities.

The sentiment is also a social sentiment in the sense brain rot isn’t an individual’s emotion; it’s an individual participating in everyone’s emotions.

The DM verse & REELationships

Now, comes the REELatitionship. We do seek meaningful human connection, but our behavior shows we found meaning in a seemingly meaningless REElationship – a relationship forged through DMs by sharing memes & brain rot with each other. It’s not just about entertaining each other. It’s a sign that something on the internet made us think about our friends and want to share it. It’s an abstract primal motivation to share something of value only to those specific ones. Some people on the internet call it pebbling – a habit of penguins of giving smooth nest-building pebbles to potential partners as a flirtation. It’s become a metaphorical love language between people.

I want to go beyond and say:

“Is this a meme? If it’s a meme, I don’t want it.”

Ma’am, this is not merely a meme. It is an artifact of the internet’s intrusive thoughts, forged in the chaos of human wit and cultural entropy. It has no singular author, no fixed form, no allegiance to time or meaning. It is an amalgamation of countless fleeting thoughts, compressed, distorted, and reconstituted into a linguistic abomination that transcends its origins.

This visual chimera is not just humor. It is the fraying edge of reality itself, a recursive echo of irony, sincerity, and absurdity woven together in defiance of rational discourse. Its existence mocks the very idea of sanity. It spreads, mutates, and reshapes itself in ways neither the creator nor the consumer can control.

It is a spiritual declaration of mankind’s contempt for reality. It is hubris manifest. It is language untethered, a ritual of repetition that strips words of their weight until all that remains is pure, undying reference.

I can also send you brain rot if you’d like.

IYKYK

REELationships show that human connection doesn’t need words. Conversely, there is nothing to say using words, but there is a lot to share, and memes do a very good job of being the object that satisfies the urge to share.

In this DM verse, we create a private social media feed for an individual, usually a friend with whom we have a REELationship. This private feed is a form of personalization that is created by other humans for you. You can think of it as the human solution to beating the algorithm and taking back control over what we see. Here, the algorithms don’t dictate what we see. Our friends do. While we may see what the algorithms want us to see, our friends see what we want them to see. Eventually, the “liking” pattern on what we share via DM trains us to share what they would like to see. This gives control to the end user – our friend. Similarly, having a friend send you a custom feed via DMs means you get what you want to see based on what reactions you leave on reels sent to your DM. This trains your friends on what you want to see.

In total – us humans collectively take control away from the algorithm and see what we want to see. This is perhaps an inevitable reaction to losing control over our FYPs and still gaining control of what we consume, indirectly.

Memes

In another article, I elaborate on the value of memes quite a bit, but here’s the top-level summary. Memes perform 3 core roles in our lives.

• They are templated thought patterns that can be shared, referenced, and related to.
• They are complex forms of emotions that basic emotional vocabulary cannot express (or expressing it in words strips the emotion of its vibe).
• They are sources of positive emotions that protect us and help us recover from stress.

From these 3, the first 2 roles are the most significant ones when it comes to our social media usage in DMs, aka – in our REELationships.

Since memes are like templates of thoughts and references, they are literally cognitions that we share between people. They are a grammar of relatable thoughts. They make thinking easier and more comprehensible because they are made out of mutually understandable grammar (the meme template).

They also express an emotion very creatively. As a user, we are not describing an emotion on purpose. We are scrolling online, we find it in a meme/reel, we recognize it, we then realize how we relate to it, and then we share it.

These memes and reels legitimize unspoken thoughts and emotions, and REELationships get built out of those. In the process, brain rot can set in, but that is non-optional.

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