How to reclaim your brain | Pearls of wisdom #3

Shreyas Joshi
Nov 16
5 min read

From Selfish Genes to Skibidi Toilet: A Reflection on the Modern Meme

If you've spent any time online, you're fluent in the language of the modern internet "meme." But these aren't just fleeting jokes; they are tiny packets of information that spread at the speed of light, shaping how we communicate and think.

I confess, I’ve been feeling their effects, too: the same restlessness, the same short-circuit in my ability to read books or sit through a movie. I see these memes not as disposable jokes, but as powerful artifacts. To understand their impact, we must excavate their conceptual origins.

To truly grasp the phenomenon, we must first journey back to a time before the internet, to an idea born not in code, but in the field of evolutionary biology.

The Original Blueprint: Unpacking Richard Dawkins' "Meme"

The term was coined long before the first dial-up modem connected to the web. In his landmark 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins introduced the concept to explain how culture evolves.

He defined a "meme" not as an image, but as a unit of culture itself:

a unit of cultural transmission spreading from mind to mind.

Dawkins saw memes as the cultural equivalent of genes. Just as genes replicate and spread through a population biologically, memes — which he described as anything from melodies and catchphrases to ideas and fashions — replicate and spread through a culture by imitation.

While the core principle of replication remains, the internet’s ecosystem has transformed Dawkins' thoughtful concept into something far more potent and immediate. This begs the question: how did a biological analogy become the supercharged engine of internet culture?

Dawkins' Cultural Replicator	The Modern Internet Meme
A unit of cultural transmission spreading from mind to mind, analogous to a biological gene.	A form of cultural shorthand, often low on context and high on emotional punch.
Could be any unit of culture, from a melody to a fashion trend.	"Intellectual popcorn" designed for immediate impact and transmitted in seconds.

The Digital Catalyst: How the Internet Supercharged the Meme

The internet is what turned the "meme" from an academic theory into a household word. Dawkins’ original idea of a "cultural replicator" has become supercharged in the digital age, finding a perfect ecosystem in which to thrive.

To understand why this ecosystem is so effective, we can turn to the media theorist Marshall McLuhan, who famously argued that "the medium is the message."

The true impact isn't the content of the memes, but the way the platforms that deliver them — with their endless scrolling and 15-second clips — are fundamentally rewiring how we think. This environment exploits our brain’s neuroplasticity, training it to crave constant novelty and making deep focus feel unnatural.

Memes are perfectly suited for this landscape. They offer "quick hits of amusement" that satisfy brains rewired by constant scrolling to expect and crave immediate rewards. In this attention economy, the meme is the ultimate currency.

The New Vernacular: How Memes Are Rewriting Language

The most profound impact of the modern meme is arguably on language itself. For Gen Z and Gen Alpha, entire vocabularies have been born not from books or traditional lived experiences, but directly from memes and viral online references.

This new vernacular includes a rapidly shifting lexicon of terms:

Shawty
blud
rizz
mad lit
no cap
Skibidi Toilet
Fanum Tax
moye-moye

These are not just slang words; they are "micro cultural phenomena" that spread instantly across the globe. They are often completely "unmoored from geography, history or depth," yet they powerfully shape the worldviews, inside jokes, and values of millions without conscious reflection. When our language itself is assembled from fragments unmoored from context, we must consider the deeper consequences for how we build meaning, share values, and understand the world.

Conclusion: Thinking Critically in a Meme-Filled World

The journey of the "meme" from a thoughtful biological analogy to a lightning-fast unit of internet culture mirrors the broader shifts in how we process information. What began as a way to understand cultural evolution has become a primary driver of it.

It's crucial to recognize that memes are not just harmless jokes. They are potent "cultural replicators" that reinforce a neural wiring for "quick hits of amusement" over sustained, critical thought. If we don’t understand how our ancient brain hardware reacts to this modern overload, we risk losing the very capacities—focus, creativity, insight—that make us human.

As you navigate this meme-filled world, the challenge is not to reject technology but to master your own mind within it. Our brain’s adaptability, its neuroplasticity, works both ways. We can consciously retrain our attention. This requires framing awareness not as a passive state, but as an essential intellectual survival skill. Protecting your capacity for deep focus, creativity, and reflection is an act of intentional neural rewiring—a critical mandate for anyone seeking to thrive in the digital age.

Intentional Strategies for Restoring Focus

Acknowledge and Recognise the Problem: The very first step towards fixing the issue is recognizing the problem and having awareness and intentionality.
Progressive Overload for Attention: This strategy treats attention like a muscle that needs strengthening through incremental challenges. If the brain is currently trained to watch 15-second reels, one should not immediately attempt to read a heavy 500-page book. Instead, start small: try 5 minutes of focused reading, then 10, then 20, over time building mental endurance.
Dopamine Rebalancing: This involves actively reducing stimulus overload to restore the capacity for deep focus.
- Set aside periods, perhaps 30 minutes in a day or maybe two, to sit and literally do nothing stimulating (no phone, no TV, no podcast, no YouTube).
- Pushing through this period of non-stimulation helps to reset the dopamine baseline.
- After a few weeks of practice, normal activities such as reading a book or engaging in a slow conversation can start to feel rewarding again.
Mindful Consumption and Intentional Reflection: After viewing content, one must actively reflect on it.
- Ask questions like, "What did I learn?" and "How does it connect to what I know?".
- After a video or article ends, try not to click away immediately; instead, sit quietly for a minute, let the information settle, and ask what resonated and what could be done differently tomorrow.
- This small act of intentional reflection fights "brain rot" and reclaims a piece of neural real estate from the infinite scroll.

Environmental Designs for Deep Work

The key principle of environmental design is that our surroundings nudge our behaviour.

Make Focus the Path of Least Resistance: To maximize the chances of deep work, you must structure your environment so that focusing is easier than getting distracted.
Make Distraction a Path with High Resistance: Introduce friction to accessing infinite content. Examples include:
- Putting your phone in another room when you are working or studying.
- Using website blockers.

Institutions and platforms also need to consider design changes to support focus, such as schools teaching attention literacy, employers incentivizing deep work over constant digital communication, and platforms considering more humane design principles (less infinite scroll and more conscious pausing).

Ultimately, survival may depend on relearning how to pay attention deeply, the capacities that make us human — focus, memory, and creativity — are worth protecting.