Earlier this year, I was introduced to a friend’s boyfriend. When I asked him the time, he looked at his phone, which had numerals I didn’t recognise. He told me they were an ancient numbering system he was learning. I asked why he was learning this, and he said he adopted ‘knowledgemaxxing’ as part of his lifestyle. He said that he tried to acquire knowledge about anything at every single opportunity he could and regularly changed his phone’s language, listened to podcasts, and read non-fiction as often as possible. He joked obnoxiously that he hadn’t read fiction in a long while.
It’s worth noting that this was approximately five minutes into our meeting. The moment the group fake-laughed along with him was, as we discovered later, the moment we all unanimously decided we weren’t going to like him. For the following few months, particularly after their breakup, the term ‘knowledgemaxxing’ became among my friends a stand-in term for a person being pretentious, or having a superiority complex.
He wasn’t alone: ‘knowledgemaxxing’ and its contemporaries are a growing online movement. I have started to see this being served up by my own algorithm and come up in conversation more frequently, to the point where it has even been getting into my head and shaping how I think about learning.
The latest iteration of trendifying ideas of upskilling or investing in one’s cognition is called ‘75 Smart’. It has emerged off the back of the ‘knowlegemaxxing’, and it is the neighbour of ‘looksmaxxing’ and another viral iteration, the ‘personal curriculum’ which did the rounds in September, involving encouraging adults to use the start of the school year to teach themselves a topic.
‘75 Smart’ is a play on the controversially intense workout regime ‘75 Hard’, which reached mainstream use last year. 75 Hard is health-focused, and involves 75 days of two 45-minute workouts, one of which must be completed outside, along with drinking 4.5 litres of water every day, cutting out alcohol, and sticking to a structured diet. If you fail to meet all of the criteria one day, you have to start again.
This new alternative version, based around the same concept, was created by TikTok creator Sarah Lynn, who said she felt her brain had “turned to absolute mush” because of social media. Sarah Lynn, who goes by the name @where_youre_planted on TikTok, previously made vegan cooking content. In the video posted in December, she speaks about how she feels that her brain “used to be so capable of doing so much, learning so much, storing so much. I used to be so much more articulate with my words and be able to describe my thoughts, feelings and opinions, and I’ve just lost it.”
Lynn’s 75-day challenge aims to help participants think more independently and intellectually. She devised the challenge, she said, in order to revive her “creativity and independent thought”. Here are the rules she lays out in her video:
- No headphones for a 15-minute morning walk.
- No social media from 9:30pm to 10am
- Read a paper book for at least 10 minutes every day.
- Write a full notebook page every morning.
- No multitasking media, e.g., scrolling during TV.
- 7 hours of sleep, no matter what.
- Learn guitar – or do any dexterous activity – for at least 10 minutes 3 times per week.
- Practise a language three days per week minimum.
She ends her video with a final call to action:
Who’s going to join me in getting rid of brain rot, becoming cooler, smarter all around and reclaiming our brains from the evil corporations who are doing their best to steal them from us?
The advice Sarah suggests are all good ideas. I don’t do everything on the list every day, and may take some of the advice on board. There is a nice emphasis on being slow with yourself and focusing on deepening independent thought and creativity. The advice given is unlikely to cause burnout or mental exhaustion; the advice is easy to integrate and personalise to improve mental health and quality of life.
What I’m interested in is the wave of anxiety that this trend is riding on. A social media trend based on how to solve the problem social media itself is causing is, of course, steeped in irony – but more than that, this whole subculture is a quickly emerging large facet of the internet. What I find very interesting about this is less how it exists online in the form of challenges or trends, but the kind of anxiety being targeted and exploited by a lot of young people about the infamous ‘brain rot’.
‘Brain rot’ is a loaded term that gets thrown around a lot, so much so that it has lost really all meaning (if it ever even had any). Whether it is possible to have your ‘brain rotted’ from social media usage is an oversimplification, because social media is not a monolith and can be used in so many different ways, with varying but also largely unquantifiable impacts. However quantifiable or not, this is the affliction Sarah anecdotally claims to be experiencing, and the virality and reach this and the other similar trends have had at least proves that other people feel affected as well.
Being aware the issue is nuanced and somewhat overblown doesn’t erase the anxiety that I see from many peers. What sparked a desire to write this piece was a conversation at an event with people I had just met, in which the group – all in their early twenties – were saying that they really wanted to learn a language to stimulate their brains. When I added that I was learning a language, they all reacted congratulatory, like I had the latest bag or had announced a new job.
The response seemed as though engaging in cognitively stimulating activities is emerging as some sort of status symbol. As property and wealth grow out of reach, what becomes realistically aspirational is distinction in the form of individual thought, cultural awareness, and talents or abilities.
Sarah, in her video, recognises astutely in her closing remarks that social media companies and those in positions of power benefit from keeping your attention on the apps. I would say that the benefit to them is not merely financial, but also in inhibiting independent thought and critical thinking, as free thinkers critique the system.
Her solutions of being talented, well-read and multilingual as a status symbol are nothing new, but I do believe it is taking on a new audience with renewed anxieties. We are all afraid of having tastes and preferences that are unoriginal and entirely algorithmic. This feeling is accelerated for young people like Sarah and me, who have grown up entirely within this algorithmic environment. Therefore, adding something to yourself that makes you unique and demonstrates expertise or skills shows that you are willing and have the capacity to devote time and energy to something, proving that you are above the algorithm.
This is also where the luxury sphere is already, with sleep optimisation tools and trackers, phone-free resorts, and many luxury boarding schools having strict phone bans, like we were returning to the ‘leisure class’ system of the early twentieth century, with only the rich affording screen-free leisure time. Someone said to me recently, “If I were rich, I wouldn’t be scrolling Instagram reels”.
I am interested in this topic because I have fallen victim to this mindset in a way I am not proud of. I don’t have TikTok, but I do scroll on Instagram for various reasons, political commentary, cooking videos, and of course videos of dogs. I still find myself feeling embarrassed when someone mentions a social media trend or an in-joke that I find myself understanding. I used to not think about it, but all the headlines about cognitive decline, groupthink, herd mentality, and brain rot probably irrationally concern me.
When I first saw Sarah’s video, I found myself congratulating myself for being able to do the things on the list already. This anxiety is honestly pushing me to be a more obnoxious, judgemental version of myself that I don’t like, more similar to ‘Mr Knowledgemaxing’ I met last year. Another friend told me he bent over backwards before paying a small fortune for a box of Labubus for his girlfriend, who was swept up in the internet craze of these small, ugly dolls last summer. I found myself judging a person I’d never even met for the perceived failing of wanting a product seen on social media – something I am far from immune to.
Within ‘brain rot’ discourse, even in the solutions, there is a lesser spoken byproduct which is leading to further divide. Good cognitive abilities and attention span become status symbols only afforded to those who don’t need to be plugged in; they have to exist in distinction to something else. While Sarah and her followers might be embarking on healthy habits, we are, on some level, having to adopt them in competition with an alternative.
In the camp next to Sarah’s social media detox content, there are creators sharing expertise on topics to try to solve the problem from within. They make up a rising group of creators gaining popularity for making use of social media for one of its intended roles in society as a cultural intersection to share knowledge, skills and information. Many of these creators centre their information sharing around arming oneself against the push by tech companies to erode critical thinking.
I’m not arguing that scrolling TikTok is great for your brain; it does squash all nuance, relying on snippets of a topic or event, algorithmically optimised and slimmed right down to be easily and quickly consumed and moved on from. However, within this conversation, we have to make room for compassion and be aware of the judgment that comes with this new status currency.
I think we (and I) need to be more aware of the ways we think about social media usage in ourselves and others. I think getting offline and working on ways of improving cognition is great, but it shouldn’t mean that we look down or make assumptions about others. And as Sarah says, we need to remember who we really should be judging, and those are the predatory tech companies that benefit from our time and attention.
