Brainrot is symptomatic of a positive change in our culture. Don’t believe me? Give me a chance to explain.
By brainrot, I mean that flood of absurd, self-canceling digital content that is intentionally low quality and lacking any rhyme or reason. Examples of brainrot include the skibidi toilet meme or the incoherent “6-7.” Brainrot is extremely pervasive in Gen Z culture.
Many call it cultural decay. Doubtless, doomscrolling or an overconsumption of senseless content will have harmful effects on any frequent viewer. Nothing is charming about the memes themselves; however, brainrot as a phenomenon is a brutally honest indication of a step toward a culture that prioritizes objective truth, an earnest inner cry for the good, beautiful, and true.
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It’s 1916 in Zurich. World War I is still raging. The horrors of the war were like none that came before it. Modernized weaponry led to the unforeseen tragedies and losses associated with trench warfare. The Great War put a definitive end to any romantic notions of battle that had come before it in previous ages. The reality of significant and widespread horrors led to a radical shift in the cultural understanding of many topics, including religion, objective truth, and, most relevant here, art.
The dire pessimism resulting from the war gave rise to an art style known as Dadaism, with the express purpose of mocking the ideas of the world before the war. It saw the ideas of the “old world” as the cause of the war and sought to protest everything associated with those ideas. Dadaist artists rejected logic, reason, and traditional aestheticism and embraced chaos and absurdity as a way to protest what they believed led to the senselessly violent conflict.
In brief and somewhat simplified terms, Dadaism at its core originated as a means to mock the concept of objective truth in an “aesthetic” way.
Dadaism’s assault on traditional art helped give rise to Surrealism, with its fascination for the dreamlike unconscious of the artist and disregard for objective reality, and later to Abstract Expressionism, which sought to emphasize subjective feeling over rational control. In response to this stark subjectivity, Minimalism pursued an austere, impersonal clarity, stripping art to its most basic elements. If Dada mocked the old certainties, Minimalism stripped away almost everything that remained.
In the 2010s, Minimalism made a significant resurgence. Significant may be an understatement. Likely fueled by Apple’s successful design choices, it was the art style of choice everywhere, whether in art museums, commercial packaging, or in architecture on streets around the country. It seemed, for a time, like every week, a new business would rebrand its long-held, so-called “busy” logo with a sleek, clean, new minimalist one.
Gen Z, with their beige moms, experienced this minimalist resurgence as children. Instead of appreciating the form and function of the art style, they rejected Minimalism as being as strikingly bare as an emperor wearing invisible clothes. Millennials cried, “Less is more!” Gen Z responded, “No! Less is actually less!” To Gen Z, Minimalism is the prioritization of function at the cost of meaning. It is productivity without purpose. It is cold corporatism without soul.
War once drove us to meaninglessness. Now, that same meaninglessness is driving us to meaning. The philosophy behind Dadaism and Brainrot may appear similar due to their shared focus on meaninglessness, but nothing could be further from the truth. Dadaism mocked reality. Brainrot mocks what the modern art movement ultimately embraced: nothingness.
Brainrot is the antithesis of Dadaism. Dadaism is a mockery of the objective, the logical, the very idea of truth. It rejected the good, beautiful, and true. The absurd becomes more absurd, but, thankfully, the progression is not endless. The cycle ultimately ends with the absurd mocking itself. Brainrot is nothingness mocking nothingness.
Brainrot does not mock reality, like Dadaism, but the absurd. It mocks a world devoid of the good, beautiful, and true. Once the absurd mocks itself and proves unacceptable, relativism becomes infeasible. Gen Z’s mockery of the void, however clumsily, reveals their longing for the transcendental life.
Gen Z will not be satisfied with smoke machines, TV screens, rock bands, expensive lights, or nifty after-service goodie bags. In a world of absence, they long for substance. When meaninglessness becomes ridiculous, meaning is the only thing left to try.
And as the Church, we offer Meaning Himself.
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