I drive my daughter to school as part of a car pool. Along the way, I am learning a new language, Brainrot.

So what is brainrot? It is what you get when you marinate your brain with silly TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Reddit memes. It is slang for "my attention span is fried and I like it". Brainrot is a self-deprecating language. Teens are basically saying: I know this is dumb, but I am choosing to speak it anyway.

What makes brainrot different from old-school slang is its speed and scale. When we were teenagers, slang spread by word of mouth. It mostly stayed local in our school hallways or neighborhood. Now memes go global in hours. A meme is born in Seoul at breakfast and widespread in Ohio by six seven pm. The language mutates at escape velocity and gets weird fast.

Someone even built a brainrot programming language. The joke runs deep, and is getting some infrastructure.

Here are a few basic brainrot terms you will hear right away.

• He is cooked: It means he is finished, doomed, beyond saving.
• He is cooking: The opposite. It means he is doing something impressive. Let him cook.
• Mewing: Jawline exercises that started half as fitness advice and half as a meme. Now it mostly means trying too hard to look sharp.
• Aura: Your invisible social vibe. You either have it or you do not. Your aura-farming do not impress my teens.
• NPC: Someone who acts on autopilot, like a background character in a game.
• Unc: An out-of-touch older guy. That would be me?

I can anticipate the reactions to this post. Teenagers will shrugg: "Obviously. How is this news?" Parents of teens will laugh in recognition. Everyone else will be lost and move away.

I have seen things. I am not 50 yet, but I am getting there. I usually write about distributed systems and databases. I did not plan to write this post. This post insisted on being written through me. We will return to our regularly scheduled programming.

But here is my real point. I think the kids are alright.

It is not uncommon for a generation to get declared doomed by the one before it, yet Gen Z and Gen Alpha may have taken the heaviest hit, and written off as lost causes. But what I see is a generation with sharp self-mocking humor. They have short attention spans for things they do not care about. I think they do this out of sincerity. They don’t see the purpose in mundane things, and for many things they feel they lack enough agency. But what is new is how hard they can lock in (focus) on what they care about, and how fast they can form real bonds around shared interests. They are more open with each other. They are more inclusive by default. They are a feeling bunch. They waste no patience on things they find pointless. But when it matters, they show up fully.

From the outside, their culture may looks absurd and chaotic. But, under the memes, I see a group that feels deeply, adapts quickly, and learns in public. They are improvising in real time. And despite all predictions to the contrary, they might actually know what they are doing.