Brain Rot and The Art of Boredom
From doomscroll to daydream: boredom feeds creativity, Brainroot feeds your brain.
Heads up, good people: CONVICTS has just birthed its first-ever product into the wild. And yes, Cure readers get a hookup so good it feels mildly illegal… More details at the end of this week’s edition.
We all know “brain rot” when we see it. Or feel it, really: you’ve been doomscrolling, snarfing up memes, lost in the Reddits, clicking swiping clicking swiping tapping through the internet’s endless well of addictive, high-fructose content. Just mainlining your choice of digital dopamine, whether opinion vlogs or cat videos or podcast comics or whatever it is, and suddenly you look around the inside of your own head and realize there is no one home.
Like a kid eating candy, eventually you can’t even taste the sweet (or sour, now that we think about those chafe-tongued afternoons by the pool) anymore—your taste buds have been fully blown out. The circuit breakers flipped. The breaker box fritzed. The system goes down, and usually, you start crying when the bad sugar trip starts.
And like candy, digital distraction comes in so many flavors. We all have our favorites. And again, like candy’s effect on teeth, this constant intake will rot your brain. We are non-judgmental experts in this, by the way, because we too have rotted our brains on the internet’s best shit, in drug dealer parlance.
Basically, the internet might’ve eradicated boredom. But the side effect of the treatment is brain rot. And though the little kid inside of us is shrieking with resistance to such an absurd grown-up’s notion…what do we lose when we lose boredom?
Boredom is probably where the longest, deepest takes on life emerge.
Consider the legend around Sir Isaac Newton. He was sitting under an apple tree when an apple fell and plunked the idea of gravity into his head. We’re pretty confident this is a made-up myth, but the point is: sitting under an apple tree, even by 17th-century standards, is not the picture of “highly engaged behavior.”
Maybe it’s not boredom, exactly, but it’s certainly boredom-adjacent. History is full of great thinkers basically hanging about killing time when zap: their history-changing idea hits ‘em like a thunderbolt and sets fire to a whole new world of thought.
Which is to say: sure, we can think and create in rapid response mode with the constant stimuli of the internet. And plenty of people can engage in deep creative thought in this environment.
It just seems like a lot of big and wild ideas need a vast amount of mental space to take root and come alive, and one native plant in this space is boredom.
Queen Anne’s Lace, sun spurge, buttercups, fireweed, mallow & dandelion are all beautiful weeds, like the organic blossoms of insight and creation born on a bored afternoon.
Perhaps our efforts to weed out boredom are really what led us here to a place where ‘Brain rot’ was named Oxford Word of the Year 2024. Where we all know exactly the flaccid, overripe texture of a brain rotten from the scroll.
And that it’s the decaying, leftover shreds of boredom’s flowers and thorns now decomposing and turning to saccharine mush in the glare of a digital sun. To put it rather dramatically.
The good news is, our brains are plenty fertile. You can cart the rot out with about the same amount of effort it takes to do actual chores in the actual outdoors. If that. You’ve just got to settle for a moment, read, and meditate. Write or doodle. Engage in slow and contemplative thought.
Or you can blast the rot out with exercise, right? Which, at its best, hits like a power washer for the inside of your skull.
And there are probably a whole number of other advanced ways to clear the burnt-goo-for-brains-feeling and keen your mental edge back to sushi-knife sharpness.
One of them is…
FULL DISCLOSURE, PLUG INCOMING: CONVICTS, the creative studio responsible for The Cure in all its shiny blatherings, is officially launching its first-ever product called Brainroot.
It’s a nootropically enhanced sparkling water full of vitamins and minerals and other shit that helps make you smarter supports brain health. This noggin-juicing seltzer is one of the various supplements, beverages, salves, ointments, tinctures, and general curios that goes into the Curemeister’s weekly writing process.
It comes recommended in good taste and, indirectly, helps fuel The Cure’s success, both chemically and behind the scenes. Truth be told, we’ve been practically living off the stuff for the past 18 months, and now you can too… if you’re in the US, that is. (Sorry, global fam. We’ll get there).
And because you’re here first, Cure readers get 20% off this week with code CURE20. Consider it our way of toasting the launch together.
Happy Friday,
CONVICTS
