Â̵͙͚̹̠͓̪͕̓̎ͅH̴̢̩̥͉̣̏̾͂͘H̵̛̛͎͔͕͔͎͇̻̄̍͂̏̉̇̂̎̉̄͜H̵̨̠̗̘̫͕̩̙͑͌͂͌̂̑H̴̢̛̩̗̥̪̼͇̳̔̾̿̊̀͜ͅH̵̥̝̺̱̑̒̆̓Ḩ̷̨̯̟̦̣͉̻̥̹͖͈̑̃̎̇̐͜Ḧ̶̨̠̖̗̭̅͒͛̂̈̀̐͆̂̕͝

I hate brainrot. It’s awesome.

Brainrot is delightful. I looooooooove it, and I’m not trying to be cute or facetious. The memes I see on Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube are hilarious. Whether I watch them by myself or laugh over them with my friends, the self-referential, ironic mass frenzy of cultural tidbits set to music and remixed endlessly is a goldmine of freshness and creativity. If you do not see the good in it – if you scold me for laughing at 6-7 instead of thinking about the political and economic state of the world – you are a humorless boob.

Brainrot is also absolutely awful. Western civilization’s cultural canon fraying out into infinite strands of simulacra, whose only basis for existence is how much superficial pleasure they can incite out of the masses, and which inevitably fade out into oblivion the next week, represents the end. It severs us from any semblance of cultural patrimony with the masterpieces that our forebears carefully preserved. That great repository is being used as firewood to power the machine of superficial reproductions, its energies sapped for cheap thrills.

Unless you are somebody who has the willpower and resources to wrench yourself away from your phone and rigorously pursue a liberal education, essential parts of what could have been your identity will never develop. All the energies that could have gone into transforming you into a virtuous, knowledgeable, and wise person are sucked into your stupid phone, only to be returned to you in the form of momentary bliss that fizzles away in an instant. Basically, doomscrolling is the psychic equivalent of selling your family heirlooms to buy heroin.

ts meowl lowk so tuff 🌹

I think brainrot represents the 21st century’s great art movement. I think it is the natural successor of modern art, in that it repudiates its errors with an error of its own.

Enlightenment philosophy (led by people like Descartes, Kant, and Hume) decided to renounce any notion that the world around us had any detectable res (essence), believing that any concepts or perceptions we have about the world are constructions of our own mind. Idealist philosophy renounced seeing into the inner depths of reality, cutting itself off from the importance of sense perception. Modern art followed suit, with a relativistic thread working its way through Impressionism to Romanticism to Modernism and finally meeting its terminus and blooming in the widespread present-day assumption that “well, the beauty is what you make of it!!!”

Obviously, sin didn’t enter the world during the Enlightenment; art didn’t just cease being good, let alone start being bad, in the modern era; and Descartes isn’t as wrong as the people who pulled on the threads of his ideas to unravel the proverbial sweater. What I am saying is that philosophically healthy people understand the ontological difference between goodness and aesthetic pleasure.

Brainrot fills the natural hunger of the human hole for aesthetic delight while maintaining the relativistic underpinning that everything is nonsense. Of course, none of us believe that anything is nonsense; the punchline that makes most brainrot funny is that it is silly, which itself is a recognition of its essence. But that intuition of essence is just an intuition rather than a consciously conceptualized as “meaning”, so the nihilist, who thinks his intuition is a construction of his own mind, can go on thinking he’s a nihilist, even though he’s just laughed his head off at 6-7. In this way, brainrot makes us victims of our own delight.

How is it possible to hold these two opinions, one that brainrot is awesome and the other that I hate it, simultaneously?

Sometimes when commentators commentate, they act like that which they’ve described is the only thing in the world that exists. This can make for more engrossing and vivid writing, but comes at the expense of accuracy. Of course, generalizations about the world have pedagogical value, but only if they are clarified. So, now, let me clarify my generalizations!

Brainrot would only be as bad as I’ve described it to be if it was all that we had; the more somebody uses brainrot, the closer they get to instantiating my doomsday scenario in their own life. But thankfully, our conscience constantly asserts itself in our life, calling us away from our phone and towards healthier things, be it spending time in the company of family and friends, studying, exercising, appreciating actual art (be it literature or TV shows or whatever else) or spending time in nature.

Ultimately, these worldly goods are reflections of the God who created them, and we can begin to know God by analogy through His creation. After shaking us awake in this way, He can lead us in his grace to participate in God’s life through the covenant established in Christ and through the Sacraments. All the cultural confusion that brainrot will bring on us by robbing us of our cultural heritage can’t take that away from us. So, in that way, we shouldn’t be afraid.

This gift of relation that God grants us allows us to live and thrive in the modern world. Brainrot, enjoyed in moderation and shared between friends, can be a source of joy. I said before that most of the humor in brainrot comes from the silliness; the reason that silliness makes us laugh is because we see ourselves as silly for finding it entertaining, and so, in a way, laugh at ourselves.

St. Francis described our body as “brother ass”; being composed of both a spiritual and a corporeal substance makes us loveable buffoons. Laughing at 6-7, so long as we’re not doing it as a counterfeit consolation in the absence of God in our lives, or as a way to neglect our responsibility to work and learn, like dancing or drinking or listening to music or laughing at any other stupid joke, is finding joy in our limitedness.

This is my Catholic defense of 6-7. The only problem with 6-7 is that it’s an oldhead meme; 6-1 is where it’s at now.