Semantic Suicide and the Language of Brain Rot: How Gen Z Is Rewriting Expression

We are witnessing the curious death of language. Or rather, its unceremonious implosion, which happens to be broadcasted, memed, and ironically hashtagged.

In digital spaces dominated by Gen Z and Gen Alpha, language is being hollowed out from within. Words like “rizz,” “skibidi,” and “NPC” don’t mean—they perform. Their purpose is not communicative in the traditional sense, but performative: designed for spectacle, inside jokes, and TikTok rhythms. Meaning is not something to be carried: It’s something to be discarded, reshuffled, or killed.

These words aren’t vehicles for thought but fragments of cultural noise that signal belonging, absurdity, and an aesthetic of detachment. This isn’t simply linguistic change. It’s something darker, weirder. It’s what I call semantic suicide: the willful abandonment of meaning in favour of absurdity, spectacle, and numb detachment.

The Postmodern Afterparty

Of course, language has never been fixed. Post-structuralist theorists like Derrida and Barthes have long told us that meaning is slippery, deferred, always unstable. But there was still a kind of reverence for instability itself—a romantic idea that in tearing language apart, something beautiful or revealing might emerge.

Gen Z and Gen Alpha’s linguistic habits, however, feel like what comes after that.

We’re not talking about the poetic deconstruction of language. We’re talking about its memetic evaporation.

Take “skibidi”, a term with no stable definition, that proliferated through YouTube Shorts and TikTok. It exists not because it means something, but because it feels contagious. Like a virus made of sound. Its power lies in its emptiness.

Brain Rot and the Joy of Numbness

“This is semantic suicide with a laugh track— a culture that knows it’s numbing itself, and posts about it anyway.”

“Brain rot” is the term Gen Z uses to describe the content they consume—ironically, lovingly. It’s a confession and a badge. A signal that they know they’re overconsuming, that they’ve surrendered to the absurdist algorithm, and they’re laughing through the erosion.

It’s a self-aware, almost celebratory term for what happens when you scroll for hours through videos that blur the line between absurd humour, irony, and psychological decay. “Brain rot” content is loud, repetitive, often grotesque. It doesn’t teach. It doesn’t uplift. It simply loops.

“Gen Z seems to ask: Why bother?”

This is semantic suicide with a laugh track—a culture that knows it’s numbing itself, and posts about it anyway.

Where modernist literature asked how to rebuild meaning after collapse, and postmodern literature mocked the idea of meaning itself, Gen Z seems to ask: “Why bother?”

Feeling in a World of Flattened Language

There’s something tragic here. Language has long been tied to our ability to articulate interiority—to speak of longing, pain, identity, the raw matter of being alive. But when communication is reduced to ironic memes, emojis, or absurdist slang, emotional articulation flattens.

Is “rizz” an expression of charm, identity, or flirtation? Sure. But it’s also a joke. A mask. It’s rarely used sincerely. Its power is not in connection, but in circulation.

From a non-postmodern lens, this might be called a moral or cultural crisis: not just a shift in language, but a surrender of its expressive potential. A young generation raised on infinite content is learning how to perform, but not necessarily how to speak from the soul.

A New Kind of Ritual?

“Maybe ‘skibidi’ is not a death rattle, but a spell.”

We are no longer dealing with dead metaphors. We are now living with zombie phonemes: Words that walk, twitch, and repeat, but no longer mean.

And yet, perhaps this is not the end.

Perhaps semantic suicide, like all endings, carries the seed of invention. When the old ways of speaking no longer serve us, absurdity becomes a coping mechanism. Irony becomes armour. Noise becomes ritual.

Maybe Gen Z is not destroying language so much as they are clearing the wreckage of a media-saturated, post-truth culture. Maybe “skibidi” is not a death rattle, but a spell. A weird, chaotic summoning of what might come next.

Final Thoughts

“Even in the age of brain rot, the desire to speak still pulses underneath.”

Language isn’t dead. But it’s being tested. Dismembered. Played with. Discarded. And perhaps reimagined.

Even in the noise, something is being said. Even in nonsense, we long for a signal.

And where there is longing, there is still the chance to make meaning.

Even if the next word is just: Skibidi.