Brainrot

Did the chat window eat my brain?
How many tokens will it take me to answer
that one?

I do not know.
I do not have any tokens left.

Need to wait.
Until next month.
When Claude tells me what to think.

The cursor blinks
like a metronome for outsourced thought.

blink
blink
blink

Every question,
a prompt.

Every doubt,
a subscription.

I used to argue with myself.
I used to think for myself.
Now I negotiate with context windows, for hours.

I used to forget things,
then remember them,
slowly, painfully,
until they became mine.

Now I regenerate.

I don’t finish sentences anymore.
I autocomplete opinions.

I ask for summaries
of books I meant to read.

I ask for bullet points
of conversations I never had.

I ask for confidence
with a temperature of 0.7.

Somewhere beneath
the endless markdown,
the polished prose,
the perfectly weighted hedging,

there is a thought
trying to survive long enough
to become its own.

But it times out.
Context exceeded.
Conversation archived.
Please start a new chat.

And maybe that’s the trick.
Not that the machine is smarter.
Not that it lies.
Not that it dreams.

Only that it is always there,
patient enough
to answer before I have the chance.

The hardest part of thinking
was never finding an answer.

It was sitting with the silence
long enough
to discover one.

Now silence feels inefficient.

The blank page
is a loading screen.

My own uncertainty
an error message.

Did the chat window eat my brain?

No.

I handed it over
one prompt,
one regeneration,
one “make this better”
at a time.