Rinse, lather & repeat
Can anyone tell me why our technology keeps getting smarter while our humans are starting to feel dumber? RINSE, LATHER, AND REPEAT. I ponder this as I continue to doomscroll, trapped in the perpetual wash cycle of hell, reading despair-filled comments and ”brainrot” on TikTok, which plays on my “For You Page.” All on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Wattpad AND REPEAT. Rinsing my brain of cognitive thoughts, lathering myself in constant dopamine hits, AND REPEAT.
An article reported by CNBC shows that the average person checks their phone 144 times a day. That’s not a habit; that’s a committed or extremely clingy relationship.
I used to think I was smarter than the average household appliance, but now it seems like everything is connected to Wi-Fi. Or so I thought, until I recently stepped into a Best Buy with my fiancée. I went in thinking this was a simple compare-and-contrast situation, an A/B test. It quickly became an existential crisis under fluorescent lighting. Every shelf whispered, “You are obsolete.” Even the air fryer had a touchscreen. And yet, I half-expected it to offer me cheap, self-serving AI therapy that’s ruining our brains—the amygdala's role in how we emotionally process and create perceptions.
As my boyfriend and I wandered past refrigerators that tell you when you’re low on oat milk or eggs, and TVs so big they could double as portals to other dimensions, I hoped maybe this was a break from the depressing. I stood there, surrounded by machines that can communicate, adapt and update themselves overnight.
While I still forget why I walked into the kitchen half the time, my last meal, or why I can’t answer simple questions like, "What is my favorite movie?"
There’s something unsettling about realizing that your toaster now has a better understanding of cloud connectivity than you do. I came in looking for a kitchen gadget; I left questioning my own evolution—Darwinism. Survival of the fittest, we learned in middle school biology, but now, machines can fix themselves without our help… not in a monumental way, just enough to make us believe it was just another sloppy human effort. Yet humans have reluctantly forgotten the importance of using memory for survival.
Now, our devices have become extensions of our brains—they remember everything through their 5TB processors, while our brains forget almost instantly if the information seems useless seconds after reading or learning it. That can’t be good for someone like me, whose genes from previous generations—my grandparents—carry some variant of dementia. (Source)
According to neurological studies by the National Institute of Medicine, our hippocampus decides whether a memory is worth keeping or if it should be stored long-term. Our long-term memories come in declarative and procedural types. The process of memory consolidation happens in the hippocampus, with memories spread across different areas of the cerebrum based on their perceptual qualities.
But maybe this is what evolution looks like now—not survival of the fittest, but survival of the most connected and who has the best Wi-Fi. My hippocampus tries to save meaningful memories while my amygdala has emotional meltdowns over TikToks and discussions about the demise of the United States empire.
Our brains are built for storytelling around campfires and awkward small talk, not comment sections and algorithmic chaos. So maybe next time I catch myself doomscrolling, I’ll try something radical—getting off my damn phone to work out or turning it off during lectures. Because while my phone remembers everything I forget, I’d rather not forget. And there are awkward moments I’d rather crawl into a hole and forget.
But for now, we want to experience nostalgia in a year from today after graduation or even ten years from now. We should want to remember what it’s like to be a college student in 2025. Isn’t our memories and experience what make us human?
It’s time to write stuff down.
