Core Rot

I am annoyed by any totality of things that exist in the world, outside my spheres of interest. So now I'm going to complain.

I must admit, with some reluctance and a touch of existential sighing, that I’m starting to sound like one of those people, the kind who utter things like “back in my day…” with a tone soaked in disdain and semi-ironic self-awareness. Maybe I'm prematurely aging.

Social media has turned the pursuit of identity into a spectacle of consumption. Of course, TikTok is the final boss of this cultural zombification. You can’t build anything meaningful when your attention span is being chopped into 10-second segments. There’s no room for critical thought. No space for becoming. The way it flattens everything into trend cycles that last, what — a week? Maybe two if you're lucky? It’s a meat grinder for meaning. Nothing can breathe. Nothing can become. A style is born and dies before anyone can even understand it. And then it rises again, unrecognizable, zombified, repackaged for consumption by the next wave of dopamine-dead swipers. 

And of course, now everything's a “core.” Well, it's not something new actually. Cottagecore, goblincore, emo-grungecore, emo-grunge-gothcore, clean-gothcore, whatever the hell core. I know: “things change.” But what no one wants to admit is that not all change is good. Not all democratization leads to depth. Sometimes it just leads to entropy.