Have We Lost Our Minds?

brain rot, memes, coconut trees and (re)cognition summer

Fool Me Baby, Alex Gardner (2023).

Last year, some friends and I wrote about having a ‘hedonist summer,’ a season where we encouraged readers to indulge in just about everything. Things like outdoor showers, wearing white tanks with no bras, drinking vesper martinis, and using vintage ashtrays made the list. In retrospect, it was a predecessor to this year’s ‘brat summer,’ but there was no way we could have known.

This summer the number one thing on my mind is ease. Eclipsing the midpoint of summer used to trigger an anxious ‘to-do’ list but, this year, it feels like an exhalation. My gut tells me that this slouch towards leisure is in anticipation of what’s to come later in the year. The Paris Summer Olympics have kicked off amid strikes. A war continues in the Middle East. Tropical storms destroy the islands my family grew up on. And each week, the chatter surrounding the U.S. election feels like a post-apocalyptic television series, a turbulent race downward. 

Things move frenetically, occupy mindshare for a blip, and then disappear. I was at a wedding when I heard the news about Trump’s assassination attempt. I was amused for like… two seconds, speculating with other guests. Then, I had an oyster. Then, I pulled out my phone to check a couple of memes and react to a few group chats. Then, I found my seat for the reception and moved on. 

We are as overheated as our phones, unable and unwilling to process every single thing that comes to us against our will. If I squint to make sense of things, I do feel like I fell out of a coconut tree. But most of the time it feels like I just need to rest. Maybe it feels the same for you.

i think about it all the time

Recently, I’ve been trying to understand why things need to be memed to the point of infantilization for me to comprehend. For me to pay attention. Everything important seems half-assed or a joke. Joe Biden announced his withdrawal from the presidential race in a tweet. People discovered that Kamala Harris is in the race from Pop Crave. And, honestly, maybe that’s the most effective way to reach us nowadays. It’s all we have bandwidth for. When everything is serious and everything is constantly at stake and everything is on fire…it’s like yeah, I’m going to choose to digest the predictions for Kamala’s VP through a brat green fancam scored to ‘360’ that weaves in edits of the Challengers cast. Is that okay with you? 

a real post from NBC news

There are obvious downsides to this line of thinking. It’s anti-intellectual, for one. But also, the incessant caricaturing and dumbing down of major life events numbs us to their significance. If a meme pokes fun at someone’s bad behaviour, it gives the bad behaviour a pass. Through our rapid meme-fication and IJBOLing, we obfuscate the evil of the muse and cartoon it into something less precise and palpable. It becomes a facsimile of something bad. Something that is yeah, that’s not cool but not quite evil anymore. I think of memes of Trump or the January 6th insurrection. Although the threat of the muse is blurred beneath the cartoon, it isn’t defanged. It’s us, the prey, whose vision becomes blurry, and becomes the easier target.