The Brainrot Abyss

How Nietzsche and Gandalf Helped Me Escape the Digital Abyss

Zombieitis

Do you know what’s worst about being a zombie?
You don’t know you’re one.

A half-dead soul, trapped in a human body… dulled by a numb, sleepwalking mind.
Your level of consciousness is lousy. Tuned out.

Your sense of being is decaying, day by day.

It almost feel like the introductory scene from Fight Club:

In today’s world it’s so easy to fall in this awful, nowhere-leading, bottomless pit.

A place where mind, the greatest possession of humanity, the one thing whose immense potential sets us apart from other species… goes dull, numb and forgotten.

Doomscrollling, following trends without a question, settling for a “normal-life” in a pre-programmed system full of mortgages, debts, soulless 9-5 jobs and marriages built on a sand base rather than on rational reflection…

Pick your own, but everybody suffers some form of zombieitis.

The Doom of my Scrolling

“Swipe up hahah… swipe up hahah (sent to friend) … swipe up loool hahaha!!
(saved, sent to friend).”...

Sounds familiar?
When you write it out just like I have now, you have to just laugh at how stupidly it looks and sounds. It’s so stupid you want to punch yourself in the face. Forty years ago people thought we'd have flying cars and shooting random regular people into space on the loop.

Well, this is the loop we got.

It’d be funny if it wasn’t so destructive.

I was trapped inside of this pathetic digital loop of the 21st century for…. gosh, I’d tell you if I knew it. That’s the first problem of Zombieitis. You don’t really know when you got infected. The moment you installed the app? Perhaps.

I might take some time, but I’d say it's rather fast.
All I know for certain is that it’s sneaky as hell.
Before you even half-realize what you’re doing, you’re already drowning in that cheap dopamine ocean.

I don’t want to get into details of mechanics here since you probably know that all doomscrolling is just a giant dopamine-driven business of Silicon Valley anyway.

You came for philosophy.
For the remedy. …I suppose.
And that’s what you’re about to get.

The Breakthrough

By breakthrough I refer to moments when I’ve broken the loop.

Generally there were two kinds of triggers: