Have We Lost Our Minds?
brain rot, memes, coconut trees and (re)cognition summer
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.
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?
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.
So what is the way forward? When dissociation feels irresponsible and full-time engagement feels like being skinned alive, the only solution is to change the way we think. To develop better mental firewalls that allow us to process information, maintain a sense of ease, and keep the gunk out. I have really enjoyed what writer
says about rewiring our brains to have a more fruitful summer. On her blog, Hot Literati, she details a summer challenge to help you “get your mind back.” I reached out to her for a quote and, in the spirit of her (re)cognition summer mantra, she offered to meet in person instead.We met Friday morning in the Lower East Side. I was running a bit late and felt the urge to notify her but refrained, adhering to her “don’t over coordinate plans” rule1 for (re)cognition summer:
“stop texting your friends to tell them you've arrived as you arrive. Just enter and deal with the awkward dissonance of looking for the person you intend to meet. You could meet the love of your life, a new friend.”
We discussed many things but what stood out to me was something she called “tactile monotony,” the observation that we’ve trained ourselves to receive information one way: through scrolling on our phones. I believe this contributes to the mind-numbing we are feeling, how our brain have atrophied to absorb information. Hailo offers an alternative through (re)cognition summer with habits like leaving the phone behind once a day, eating without a screen, and expanding sensory experiences. The idea isn’t to stop being online or to stop enjoying the Kamala coconut memes. The solution lies in diversifying our information intake across our senses to strengthen our brains and regain control.
We have more access to information than we’ve ever had but haven’t quite figured out how to filter it in a way that doesn’t fry our brains. Sometimes it does feel like we’ve fallen out of a coconut tree and that’s fine. But if you zoom out and lift your head from your phone, you will see a patch of grass underneath the coconut tree. It’s lush and green. You can count the blades of grass if you squint. If you’re feeling bratty, you should touch it.
Speaking of touching grass…
If you’re looking for a sensorial offscreen experience, I will be reading new fiction at
’s Herbal Supplements reading series this week! Hope to see you there :)LOOSEY is a bi-weekly newsletter about culture, technology, and the way we live. If this is something you like, consider subscribing and sharing. Let’s be friends on Instagram.
A couple of weeks ago, at the beach, I explained this rule to a friend who told me bluntly that I — an over-planner — would never be capable of accomplishing this lol
One related issue is that 24/7 instant access to media seems to (to at least some extent) collapse time and with it a sense of history.
Hailo changed my summer!!!