Brain Rot, But Make It Poetic

On projecting myself into strangers’ posts and calling it self-reflection.

October 28 2025

Each post is paired with a song. For today, it’s Friendly Fire by Rainbow Kitten Surprise.

Something weird has been happening. Every time I scroll through Instagram or TikTok, I end up hyperfocusing on some random, pointless detail that makes me feel like I’ve stepped into the video. Call it brain rot, call it overstimulation, but honestly, it feels more like an existential out-of-body experience. I’m not high, I swear. Let me try and explain.

I was watching a clip of a girl in her bedroom comparing two identical sweaters - one from The Row, one from Gap. Instead of caring about the sweaters, I fixated on what was behind her: a simple wooden chair by a window, sunlight streaming in, dust particles floating. Opposite that, a bed covered in a white duvet. The floor was a light wooden parquet. I ended up wondering what her room smelt like? Something fresh, I bet. What did the wood feel like beneath her bare feet? Did she dump her worn clothes on that chair? Did she wait for that exact slant of light every day?

Another video, another projection: a guy sitting in a London park, having a coffee and pastry. I couldn’t tell you what he was saying or even wearing - I was too busy watching the puddle beside him, the one that caught the gray sky after the rain. It reminded me of that slap-you-in-the-face kind of winter wind that feels so bad but so good.

It’s been happening a lot lately. Laundry detergent being poured into a machine, leather car seats catching sunlight, a ceramic bowl of pasta placed on a table - all of it triggering some weird, visceral reaction in me.

Maybe it’s because they’re such human, mundane things, the kind I’d usually notice in real life. Maybe it’s because I’m sleep-deprived. Maybe it’s because I watch everything on mute now and the visuals hit harder. Probably all of the above.

One thing I remember from uni keeps coming to mind though. In Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes, he describes the viewer’s experience of a photograph through two ideas: studium and punctum.

“Studium refers to the general, cultural, and conventional interest in an image, like recognizing a person or a scene. Punctum is a specific detail within the image that personally and emotionally “pricks” or pierces the viewer, creating a deeper, subjective connection beyond the general meaning.”

I guess that’s what’s been happening. These random details have been my punctum - pricking me, making me bleed emotionally. I think they pull me back to my own unprocessed moments from the past year, in Lebanon, in Jordan, in the U.S., where I lived whole lives in each but never fully had the time to process them, until I end up looking back at videos and photos of those moments.

Now, when I scroll, something about these tiny, ordinary details pulls me back there. It’s like my brain is finally catching up, finding pieces of myself scattered across random clips and corners of other people’s lives, processing everything that once rushed by too fast.

Maybe that’s what brain rot is - just the punctum in disguise. The algorithm keeps feeding me details that accidentally make me feel something. So yeah, I guess I’ll keep scrolling and finding myself in more dust particles, puddles, and pasta bowls.

Wow. I really had no idea where this was going when I started writing so thank you for helping me self-diagnose.

Until next time.