Our Trains of Thought Need More than Search Engines

’Tis the season for language gurus to announce their “Words of the Year.” The 2024 selections from Merriam-Webster and Oxford are “polarization” and “brain rot,” respectively. Cultural critics may conclude these choices—alongside samples from previous years—suggest a certain pattern of thought, or anti-thought.

Both declarations offer a dismaying diagnosis of the state our society is in, especially our state of mind. They highlight our frequent failure to cozy up to reality, which is now home-delivered online.

Let’s look at these words and several others which dictionary editors and readers have observed as obstacles to our pursuit of wisdom.

Polarization

Merriam-Webster declared polarization as this year’s top pick on December 9, based on the volume of searches for its definition at the company’s website.

The US-based dictionary company defines the word as “division into two sharply distinct opposites; especially, a state in which the opinions, beliefs, or interests of a group or society no longer range along a continuum but become concentrated at opposing extremes.”

Polarization is hardly a new idea, dating back to the early 1800s, Merriam-Webster points out. It emerged from physics and a description of light waves. But this led to an application in politics and culture “that helps define the world today” among people across the ideological spectrum.

America’s election season this year suffered from a polarization of opinions cultivated by the candidates themselves and adopted by voters in emotional, as well as policy-centric, ways.

Indeed, with encouragement by the mainstream media and social media, policy differences mattered less than rhetoric of doubt and fear, even hatred. For too many people who saw no opportunities for compromise, polarization was practically the only thing they agreed upon.

Brain Rot

The Oxford English Dictionary, which announced its choice on December 2, defined brain rot as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.”

This describes a sort of information inflation in which the sheer quantity, and dreary quality, of digitized words and images filling our heads make each particular bit or byte less valuable—merely clogging our cognitive pipes.

Oxford also acknowledged its term has a history. It first appeared in the 1854 book Walden, in which Henry David Thoreau “criticizes society’s tendency to devalue complex ideas, or those that can be interpreted in multiple ways.” He sees the retreat to simplistic thinking as “a general decline in mental and intellectual effort.”

Take note that the original meaning has morphed slightly, but its new iteration “increased in usage frequency by 230 percent between 2023 and 2024,” according to Oxford. The UK-based publisher cited not only its own data-mining metrics on the term’s appearances, but also research in which lexicographers surveyed and conversed with the general public.

Brain rot gained traction “on social media platforms—particularly on TikTok among Gen Z and Gen Alpha communities,” says Oxford. Usage has spread to mainstream journalism, often as a self-deprecatory description of online information, akin to critiquing one’s diet as junk food.

By the way, “Gen Alpha” has become a label for people born between 2010 and 2024, according to Michele Debczak at Mental Floss. Much of this age cohort was in grammar school during the days of pandemic shutdowns. Members of Generation Z were born between approximately 1997 and 2010.

Taken together, these two groups constitute the “digital natives” now under the age of about twenty-seven, already deeply influenced by America’s online culture and influencing it, as well.

Those talking about brain rot, even if their intention is humorous, might be expressing the modern-day equivalent of “Houston, we’ve got a problem.”

Whether one uses Thoreau’s formulation of intellectual laziness or the updated interpretation of mental unwellness caused by information gluttony, this concern warrants digging for more context among some “words of the year” from the past.

Authenticity

Merriam-Webster named “authentic” as its 2023 selection. Again, their conclusion came largely from a surge in the number of times online visitors searched for the meaning of the word.

Editors opined that, “with the rise of artificial intelligence—and its impact on deepfake videos, actors’ contracts, academic honesty, and a vast number of other topics—the line between “real” and “fake” has become increasingly blurred.

Our culture places a high value on authenticity, or the trait of being true to one’s core identity, but this secular, relativistic era of expressive individualism allows us plenty of leeway in defining and enforcing who we are. A previous edition of Phronesis in Pieces titled “That Man is Not Real!” discussed the challenge of reality in this light.

Gaslighting

In 2022, Merriam-Webster’s word of the year was “gaslighting.” The news release defined this as “a psychological manipulation of a person, usually over an extended period of time, that causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories and typically leads to confusion, loss of confidence and self-esteem, uncertainty of one’s emotional or mental stability, and a dependency on the perpetrator.”

A number of media voices had accused former president Donald Trump of being a key perpetrator of gaslighting in the political arena during 2022, the company commented.

Post-Truth

We can look further back to 2016, when Oxford made one of its most perspicacious and prophetic picks of all, “post-truth.” The publisher defined this adjective as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

No one can deny that the presidential election Americans recently survived was a post-truth experience par excellence, marked by a near-collapse of public trust in candidates, pronouncements, and institutions on the right and the left.

Merriam-Webster’s word for 2016 happened to be “surreal.”

Truthiness

That publisher presaged America’s eroding sense of reality way back in 2006 by selecting the word “truthiness”—defined as “truth coming from the gut, not books; preferring to believe what you wish to believe rather than what is known to be true.”

Nostalgia for 2003

We might say Merriam-Webster provided in 2003 a prequel to the saga of our polity’s pursuit of truth through language. Data regarding lookups of definitions that year surprised even its editors.

According to the Writers Write website, “The number one word of the year, which received by a wide margin the most unexpectedly large number of user-requests,” was "democracy."

John Morse, publisher of Merriam-Webster, was quoted with this explanation: “To the surprise of some, the most frequently looked-up words are not the newest words, not the latest high-tech terms, not the cool new slang. Instead, the users are most interested in exploring full definitions for words cropping up in current media headlines or in other kinds of daily reading and conversation—not so much new words as newly popular words.”

This comment from two decades ago now evokes a bit of poignant irony. In 2003, the year when the precursor of Facebook (Facemash) helped trigger a social-media explosion, Merriam-Webster observed its users acting traditionally, digging for “full definitions for words” found in forms of “daily reading and conversation” they respected.

In another irony, Merriam-Webster mentioned in its 2024 announcement that democracy returned as one of its runners-up, again showing a “large increase in lookups.”

Not only did its current site-users want to “fully understand what [democracy] means,” but this year they also sought “to challenge, celebrate, and protect it”—representing people “who consider it triumphant and those who think it’s at risk.”

The culture of virtuous learning and diligent truth-seeking, prescribed by America’s founders as crucial for our democratic republic, seems to have slipped downhill to the newly designated milepost of brain rot.

We have circled back to the subject of democracy, this time with a sense of confusion—or polarization. Alas, people see a mélange of governance concepts other than democracy being championed and negative impressions about democracy being amplified.

Looking Ahead

Is the ubiquity of social media use—along with other trends in education, media, civil society, and common-good thinking—leading us to a place of impotence in our political lives? Is there something rotten in the state of mind online?

The mere fact that lexicographers are helping us “watch our words” every year actually should give us hope, provided we focus less on snapshots of their popularity and more on how those terms are being used.

Casper Grathwohl, president of OUP’s Oxford Languages, shares this optimism in an online statement about his dictionary and other initiatives. He says his company’s mission is “to unlock the power of language for learning and for life.” The goal is to provide “more versatile and accessible formats for building and sharing language knowledge worldwide.” That’s a helpful context for critiquing social media.

Recall that Oxford acknowledged brain rot is discussed by many digital denizens in a self-deprecatory or humorous way. Young people, who are in many ways the driving force for our culture, see the complex paradox of risks and potential rewards of technology they are using. Deep down, they know there’s a challenge to be faced.

Social analyst Malcolm Gladwell, in his new book Revenge of the Tipping Point, invites us to take a nuanced look at our contagious tendencies of thought. He wrote 25 years ago, in the runaway best-seller The Tipping Point, that relatively few people can generate an outsized impact on ideas that come to dominate society’s collective mind.

That earlier book came before various online danger zones had risen to prominence, exercising their ability to accentuate, confirm, or condemn certain points of view. When C-SPAN Book TV’s Peter Slen recently asked Gladwell how social media had affected his analysis of brain contagions, the author showed candid concern based on his new book.

“The phenomenon has become even more asymmetrical,” Gladwell said in the video interview, acknowledging that it takes fewer people than ever to shape what we’re thinking. Also, our gestating opinions hit transformative tipping points even faster than before.

It has been said roughly 90 percent of social media communication is dominated by 10 percent of those who actively post their often-volatile comments.

Gladwell might have been incorporating insights from philosopher Rene Girard (1923-2015), who famously argued that human behavior is based on “mimetic desire”—our proclivity to imitate others for the sake of popularity and belonging.

Girard noted that mimesis ironically tends to promote conflict; we want to be the undisputed paradigms of the ideas we adopt and promote (discussed in a previous Phronesis in Pieces in August 2023).

Looking Up

One more piece of the puzzle comes from Gladwell, who suggests in Revenge that our behavior is based not only on personal copycatting, but on “overstories,” or “meta-narratives,” which reflect a broader community’s shared stories.

This appeal to common ground and bigger truths may be the tipping point we advocates for reality should welcome as we reflect upon responsible consciousness. Even if “words of the year” hint at a plague of brain rot and polarization, we should look around—and almost literally “look up”—for higher stories that put words in a bolder, broader context.

Words are the building blocks of stories, but the stories themselves carry value through human beings’ values, experiences, and aspirations. In our post-truth culture and our “attention economy,” we too often use words because they are au courant, attention-grabbing, even weaponizable, not because they can build communion.

Christians and other people of faith place an especially high value on the Word, on the Logos, and on words in general not because they are popular data points, but because they help to unlock meaning in stories which can be shared and interpreted.

Upon his announcement of the brain rot selection, Oxford’s Grathwohl said such terms show society’s “growing preoccupation with … the way internet culture is permeating so much of who we are and what we talk about.” He continued, “It feels like a rightful next chapter in the cultural conversation about humanity and technology.”

The necessary guard rails for our wild, sometimes withering use of words must come largely from people of faith, especially as we consider the dehumanizing threats from society’s use of technology.

Words are only part of the stories we are living, the tools for progress and corrective action we are chasing. Likewise, the distractions of social media are only the most obvious digital force currently presenting themselves for analysis.

We need to be aware of how other forces like artificial intelligence, rigorous cybersecurity, and the treasures of our human knowledge, integrity, and creativity can be marshaled. This requires personal discipline, clear-minded outreach, and stories about us at our best.

If we want to spice up the stories with memorable terms, we can draw from Pope Francis’ 2024 World Communications Day message about artificial intelligence. He called for people from all walks of life to join together to monitor the dangers, to pursue regulations and policies that will make AI “person-centered.”

Another term to contribute—and to work on defining even better—is “human flourishing,” which is the stated mission of Humanity 2.0, an incubator for global initiatives headed by philosopher Father Philiip Larrey. He is one of the Vatican’s leading experts on emerging technologies, who holds abundant conversations about the irreplaceable genius of human nature.

There are many other examples of computer experts, faith-based organizations, and well-intentioned advocates leading endeavors based on Catholic social-justice principles and transcendent values. These rise above self-serving strategies and contrived language. We need to “spread the word” about these efforts to help tell the upbeat truth that will stir us from our social-media sloth.

Young people and entrepreneurs sense the difficult future emerging in digital communication. Most want to approach it constructively and collaboratively, face-to-face and heart-to-heart, going beyond a trivialized “internet culture” of information inflation.

A talent pool that is conscious of belonging to something bigger, seeking the best for the human community, will help all generations to prioritize words and deeds on an upward trajectory. Are we talking about brain rot? Let’s focus on the brain! Talking about post-truth? Let’s focus on the truth!

The most important step we can take to short-circuit disillusionment and disengagement as we write the “next chapter” in our cultural conversation is to spark faith-filled imaginations across all fields of communications and governance. We can counter frustration about anti-thought politics or technology by clarifying our pro-human principles.

Regardless of what new words will pop out in tomorrow’s online searches or endure longer to guide a greater mission, our virtuous stewardship of consciousness and conscientiousness, expressed in stories of real-world potential, should be the pattern of thought in our media.

Aided by dictionary lookups but not limited by them, we’ll spell out the best ways to define ourselves.

Image from ClipSafari.com, a collection of Creative Commons designs.

Phronesis Plus

Welcome behind the paywall, where you’l find premium content for “Phronesis in Pieces.”

In this edition, an additional commentary by Bill Schmitt published this month in the blog of the Magis Center, a catechetical organization directed by Father Robert Spitzer, SJ. Advent Lessons: Fr. Mychal Judge’s Prayerful Example

Advent Lessons: Fr. Mychal Judge’s Prayerful Example

The liturgical season of Advent inspires many people to think more broadly about how Christ comes into our lives. We also have a handy prayer to help us experience His presence more deeply.

This booster shot of expectancy doesn’t rely on theological gravitas. Think instead of a priest who had long adapted to New York City’s moral mayhem by learning to heed God’s ways to keep discipleship simple. Imagine this minister using dry wit to welcome Jesus, saying, now we’ve got You right where You want us!

We’re told Father Mychal Judge, OFM (1933-2001), expressed this practical attitude and profound aspiration when he prayed every day:

“Lord, take me where you want me to go; let me meet who you want me to meet; tell me what you want me to say; and keep me out of your way.”

It’s likely he had said this prayer on the morning of September 11, 2001, when he began his official duties as New York Fire Department chaplain by joining the first responders after a plane crash was reported at the World Trade Center.

His immediate task was to offer prayer and assistance to the wounded and the rescuers in the North Tower’s emergency command post. Suddenly, massive debris rained down upon that space from the South Tower. Firefighters carried Judge out of the chaos, and he became the first certified fatality—victim 0001—from the day’s terror attacks.

More details of this Franciscan’s life story, available at Mychal’s Message, National Catholic Reporter, Franciscan Media, and other websites tell of the priest’s caring and charismatic traits. A Brooklyn native who was ordained in 1961, he regularly ministered to the homeless, as well as AIDS patients, at a time when fear of catching the disease stirred prejudice and reduced the ranks of caregivers.

Always eager to meet urgent needs, Father Mychal was alert to Christ as the protagonist in a grand story of God’s desire to be with the marginalized and save all His children.

That connects Mychal’s message to the alertness that Advent intends to instill in us. One might say the message helps transform the Advent journey into an adventure.

The season’s prayers, Scripture readings, and sacraments surround us during the four Sundays prior to Christmas, preparing us to appreciate the gift of redemption we’ll receive by dint of Jesus’ Incarnation.

Advent’s liturgical lens also zooms out from the Christmas crib to raise our awareness of Christ’s second coming at the end of time, another pivotal moment where the eternal and the temporal touch.

The Catholic Church sees God’s grand story everywhere. His salvific relationship with mankind is the ongoing context that helps us make sense of our smaller day-to-day joys and crosses.

Advent stretches our spirits still more broadly. It spotlights Jesus’ coming a first time, a second time, and in the here and now. A virtuous storyteller might say Good News isn’t really news unless we observe it unfolding every day, instructively, purposefully, and truthfully.

Pope Paul VI put it this way: “The history of salvation is being accomplished in the midst of the history of the world.”

We need to experience this history taking shape in our minds, hearts, and souls, as well as in our encounters with others, with grace, and with spiritual battles against the chaos of sin. Advent ties our journey to the Mass, especially to the transubstantiation of bread and wine into Christ’s divine body and blood—as sustenance in the battles.

Human beings need the will and willpower to receive, parse, and participate in all the deep reality going on beneath the superficiality and artificiality of things our secular world calls truth. Our pilgrimage toward true happiness begins with surprise and wonder, and we can coax it along toward alertness and curiosity.

Recognizing our need to exercise our wills, sometimes by surrendering them, the Catechism of the Catholic Church notes that Advent boosts our sense of purpose in the present, partly through patient waiting. The Church calls us to “re-read and re-live the great events of salvation history in the ‘today’ of her liturgy.”

Developing a resilient motivation demands “catechesis [to] help the faithful to open themselves to this spiritual understanding of the economy of salvation. . . .” Advent “enables us to live” the love about which we’re learning. (paragraph 1095)

The prayer of Father Mychal Judge bolsters this catechesis because it helps to nudge Catholics beyond reading and hearing the Good News or merely joining together with other spectators. History is made not by spectators but by enthusiastic participants in stories being written.

Father Mychal was keenly aware of all the different ways in which God desires to save, and Christ desires to be present. These situations, whether feeding the poor, caring for AIDS patients, or ministering at Ground Zero on 9/11, require that persons “live the love about which we’re learning.” Christ’s hands and feet must truly be our own.

God is doing something new every day. Salvation history is full of surprise and mystery. When we sense God’s presence, sometimes in a gentle zephyr and sometimes in a thunderclap, we need to be “first responders” acting with agility

One might say Father Mychal’s expectancy showed a zeal sung about in the musical Hamilton. Observing the mysteries of the economy of salvation, this friar wanted to be “in the room where it happens”—as an active member of the supporting cast.

Rather than seeking celebrity or trying to tinker with God’s script, he asked only to know just enough about his role in any situation—where he might go, whom he should meet, what he might say.

This required great humility and curiosity about all that a great God could and would do through him and others. He also needed to stand by with all the tools in his spiritual toolkit. This meant always strengthening his robust faith, hope, and love, as well as his belief in miracles, delight in God’s mysteries, and trust in the unlimited power of prayer.

One of Father Mychal’s best friends is quoted regarding the Manhattan firehouse where he had an office for years:

“Whenever the firefighters would rush out on a call with their sirens going, Mychal, if in his room at the time, would go over to [the] window, raise his hand in blessing, and pray for the firefighters.”

This confidence in God at work, sometimes silently and unseen, can be likened to appreciating a beautiful piece of music whose score is filled with “rest” symbols for this or that instrument. It’s also akin to the ultimate guidance sought in Father Mychal’s prayer: “Keep me out of your way.”

Catechists may want to remind all the faithful that there is a difference between an active participant, discerning between times of action or waiting, and a disengaged or performative spectator. Sometimes, pious silence merely covers up a yawn or a virtue-signal shout.

During this Advent, the Church offers many resources for building an authentic relationship with Jesus that literally and figuratively stands the test of time. We can learn from the past, present, and future, preparing our hearts to celebrate amazing moments when the temporal and eternal connect. The challenges of journeying and expectancy become opportunities for patience, humility, and profound stories.

With the assistance of a prayer like Father Mychal’s, let’s help each other expand our alertness into a keen sense of timing, place, people, and purpose. Suddenly, we can see salvation history happening everywhere, providing chances to participate.

Honoring Jesus as teacher and protagonist, let’s strive to be right where He wants us to be whenever He calls. The adventure of Advent will grow as we become “doers of the Word and not hearers only.” (James 1:22)