Have you ever felt like the person you’re talking to is a bad mashup of the same five dating app prompts, TikTok references or whatever else is trending that week? Navigating relationships at a time when it feels like individuality is being threatened makes the dating scene as tough as the current job market.
Siena: I need my partner to be able to connect with me beyond physical intimacy. For me, that is the difference between sex that means something and sex that feels like going through the motions. I think this is why I feel like a part of me dies when, immediately after the mechanical act, he rolls over and picks up his phone. That silence replaces potential emotional intimacy with a feed of distraction. An intimate moment flattened into something forgettable.
We’re starting to treat each other like content: something to engage with briefly, then forget about until a late-night “You up?” text. Once someone feels like content, I start to lose engagement and I suddenly feel like I’m watching AI fruit Love Island on Instagram Reels.
I have come to a terrible realization: Our social media use is hindering our ability to be emotionally mature. In a climate of six-seven jokes and skibidity toilet memes, I feel like genuine connection is curdling into vacant consumption. We have a word for this now: brainrot. I argue that word might also describe your boyfriend.
Ari: Even though we know social media is bad for us, we still use it, and cover our ears when people say otherwise because we can’t help but continue to engage. I just watched this YouTube video essay about the effects of short-form media like TikTok. Short-form media is designed to be a “morsel” for our brains, robbing us of feeling full and always leaving us wanting more.
The truth is that we’re being manipulated by an algorithm that is designed to make scrolling addictive so that the next best thing is just a swipe away. That same logic starts to shape how we approach people. It doesn’t feel like much of a jump to assume that if we can barely watch a two-minute video, we will find it difficult to dedicate adequate attention to a relationship.
Siena: I agree with you. Nowadays, you swipe, you match, you lie next to someone, and that emotional and physical exchange registers the same way a TikTok does: Present for a second, then gone and forgotten forever. That feeling of emptiness leaves you with the same regret you get after a day of doomscrolling.
It reminds me of this one date. Right after, when my friend asked me how it went, I could not remember a single thing we had talked about. It’s the same feeling I get when I close an app absentmindedly and then instinctively reopen it. Clearly, the information wasn’t valuable — or I would have remembered it in the first place.
Does this happen to you? Or is my memory decaying from too many screens?
Ari: Honestly no, not really, because the people I seem to attract are pretty interesting characters, or like, insane.
My gripe with brainrot’s impact on dating culture is a bit different. Humor is so inherently subjective — if all of our humor now comes from the internet, it loses the originality that makes a joke good. Even if the delivery is top-tier, your brain-rotted boyfriend probably isn’t all that funny without the crutch of Instagram reels. Without individuality, there’s a limited amount of content to bond over, and no reason for the initial attraction to deepen into something more than surface level.
I’ll get up on my soapbox and say it: There is a collective shift happening in our generation, where it feels like there’s no uniqueness anymore.
Siena: I’m not sure that dating insane people will really save you from the brainrot epidemic. Trust me, I have definitely dated an insane man or two (or three), and not a single one has ever made me laugh the way my friends do, because most of their jokes were plagiarized from or related to online media in some way. That’s the effect of brain rot — a slow degradation of originality.
So I agree with you that there’s no desire for uniqueness anymore. Most of the time, I can predict the punchline before they even finish the joke, because I’ve already seen it 10 times online. I feel like I’m not actually getting to know a person, just recognizing patterns I’ve already encountered before.
Ari: I was once seeing this guy whose bit was “If a pretty girl tells me to shut up, I do.” I thought he was such a character. I was really disappointed when I saw the same joke circulating on Reels a few weeks later.
This collective addiction feels like a problem because bonding over TikTok references cheapens the bond a shared joke is supposed to create. If we’re all so bonded now because we’re in on these shared jokes, how do we determine if we actually get along with someone?
Would it be unrealistic to say that if we want successful relationships, we need to get off the Internet? I want someone who isn’t plugged in, so our relationship won’t be a copy-and-paste of Internet references.
Siena: There’s obviously no getting rid of the Internet. Admittedly, there’s no way I’m giving up my presence online. I like the connection that social media gives us when used correctly. Seeing fragments of my friends’ lives across the country, all within reach of my fingertips, feels like a special kind of intimacy. I don’t want to lose that.
So I think that the best way to beat the brainrot-ification of our lives and relationships is to have interests outside of the Internet. If brainrot is the slow erosion of originality, then the only way out is to spend more time away from your phone and adopt some hobbies or passions to make yourself more interesting.
Siena Giacoma PZ ’27 and Arianna Kaplan SC ’27 are aspiring documentarians of the sexually awkward, which they consider a noble and vastly undervalued literary genre. They have consciously chosen the unstable but vibrant path of writers, betting on a future of rich inner lives and fascinating anecdotes over sensible things like 401(k)s or a basic understanding of Excel.
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