Labubu Lobotomy
Brain rot is a form of self-harm protecting us from what we love.
Thirty days ago, I held a house party to celebrate my birthday. Someone I kind of know showed up late. I was drunk. He handed me a Labubu. Happy birthday, he said. My hands began shaking.
For the next several hours, and then the next day, I could not shut up about feeling an evil energy radiating from the Labubu. I would stare into its eyes and my stomach would clench. The following night, I debriefed with a friend. We needed to kill the Labubu, I said, before it killed us. I tried to cut off its head, but the knife was too weak; or the Labubu too strong.
After an hour of chatting with my friend, I forgot about the object, my attention lost in the joy of conversation and connection. I left the Labubu on the kitchen counter. When I awoke the next morning, the Labubu was gone.
It now sits somewhere in my house, I assume, watching me, ready to strike.
Over the next 30 days, I kept thinking about what so disturbed me about the Labubu. And I’ve come to realize I originally placed too much blame on the object. It wasn’t the Labubu. The Labubu was simply a representation of all that was wrong with my life.
My existence flows in cycles of focus and distraction. There are periods of weeks or months or, in really good eras of my life, even a year or so in which I feel able to be productive, both in the capitalist doing work sense but also in every other sense—generative friendships, a clearness of thought and ability to bring my brain to new places (learn new information, come up with novel ideas, sit with my discomforts and process them sufficiently). And then those periods are followed by bad periods, the ones in which I am constantly distracted by pretty much any form of dopamine I can get my hands on, whether it comes from X or Instagram or Facebook Marketplace or PornHub or drugs or not-generative forms of socializing in which nothing is gained except further distraction.
When I was handed the Labubu a month ago, I looked into its eyes, blurry as they were in my shaking hands, and saw the depths of that hell—a portal into the bad periods. The Labubu is distraction, especially distraction as it is embodied in internet culture, made physical and real and constant—not contained in a box in your pocket or a room in your house but everywhere all at once.
To carry around a Labubu, is, to me, like attaching a meth pipe to your shirt pocket, a proud symbol of your ability to perform a thousand little lobotomies on yourself throughout each day and week and lifetime, each one not-so-painful, and perhaps even a little enjoyable, something like trichotillomania, but ultimately a sign of deep fear and loss, and, cumulatively, destructive, all the little holes you’ve poked in your brain getting closer and closer together until they link up into one big one, one which is too large to heal.
It is unfair to single out the defenseless Labubu in all this, but the toy, if it can be called that (it does not really do anything), is a sign of our distraction culture, our culture of constant dopamine hits from countless sources, all of which together form a wall preventing us from investigating anything—information, each other, our own psyches and bodies and feelings—deeply.
This wall prevents us from experiencing the massive and ever-increasing amount of discomfort we are bound to feel if we were to be forced to stop and sit and think for one second about the state of our lives and world. And in that way, these things do their jobs—through their darkness, they keep the dark at bay. The worse the world gets, the more Labubus we need.
But a constantly distracted populace is one made useless, our psyches too weak to sustain anything—a revolution, the building of a better culture and community, even a conversation. We have become addicted to Labubu lobotomies for good reason, but we must kill the Labubu in our heads if we want to have any hope of getting back to a generative life.
***
It is easy to say that we are distracted and stupid. It is also easy to say that we have been distracted and made stupid on purpose—goaded by mega-corporations into spending more and more time doing useless things like scrolling and yelling on social media, because those useless things make them money. It is harder to admit that, perhaps, we want to be distracted; that we do it because it feels good.
People become addicted to cocaine or gambling or whatever because those things are addictive, sure. But they are addictive because at certain points they feel good—even the bad parts, maybe even especially the bad parts. The effective way out of addiction is not to simply say “this thing is addictive and I am addicted to it,” but to ask oneself, “why did I find enjoyment in this ultimately destructive thing in the first place?”
And so, the question becomes, why do we keep returning—what keeps us coming back to the box of nothingness in our pockets and the culture of nothingness represented by the Labubu and Dubai Chocolate and Blank Street Iced Daydream Matcha Lattes®? Why do we like giving ourselves so many little lobotomies?