With the 2024 release of Charli xcx’s “Brat” and the subsequent cultural phenomenon of its eponymous summer, it felt like the pendulum was swinging back toward an embrace of pre-COVID-19 life — people were partying and talking about partying, people were outside and attempting to create their own “brat summer.” But the summer ended as it always does, and the trend died with the leaves. What originally felt like a reversal of recent trends now appears to be the last sparks of a cultural understanding — people should be at the club.

When I say “at the club,” I do not mean it in a literal sense. Originally coined by an X user surprised that the mother from the “Berenstain Bears” was only 27, it spread as a shorthand way to say that a fictional character or figure wasn’t living out their youth. Instead of being at the aforementioned club, they were raising a family or stressed out about their job, occupied by expectations meant for a later age.

For real people, the “club” is your hobbies, your hangouts, the places that you make your own with your friends. It can be an actual club or a pottery class or book club. What it definitely isn’t is bed-rotting — the act of scrolling in bed for hours at a time.

Let me backtrack to the recent trends I mentioned earlier. While bed-rotting is a term that encapsulates much of the negative cultural trends in recent years, it includes a variety of impulses that people seem to be gravitating toward more and more. Instead of trying to make friends in the real world, you scroll. Instead of hacking away at an essay, you stick it into ChatGPT and make some edits to make it seem more “you.” Instead of writing, reading, laughing, crying, painting, dreaming, drinking or eating, you consume, one eye on a Netflix original and the other on your phone.

These impulses to stay inside and consume media, avoiding the outside world, are usually caused by a sense of dismay at the state of the world that makes them want to just be inside and do nothing, feel nothing. While a single TikTok comment can’t serve as an indictment on the state of the culture, the comment, “I just want to eat, lay in bed, watch my shows and not feel guilty about not wanting to do anything else,” gets close.

We all have those days where we want to do nothing but lay in bed — but ask yourself, “How do I feel after three plus hours scrolling on my phone?” There are days when I will watch the sun set and the sky turn black out of the corner of my eye as I scroll, scroll, scroll, and I’ve never not felt like complete shit afterward. I lose track of time, I wonder what use I got out of the time I spent in my bed and how I could’ve read one of the many books on my shelf or texted my friends to hang out.

But I never think about those things when my eyes are locked on my phone. With something so curated to your interests and dislikes, you become trapped in a world where you are the only real person — everyone and everything else is trying to keep you there to serve you ads and get you to spend money. In the words of TikToker Serena Shahidi, “name a single hobby of yours outside media consumption.” And that is what bed rotting and so much of the culture today fundamentally is — consumption.

The worst part about this constant consumption is how fulfilling it can be. You can be served up exactly what you want and what will keep you on TikTok, X or Instagram for the longest possible time. Yes, it can feel enjoyable or fun sometimes, but it is still an act of consumption that distorts your sense of what the real world actually feels like. When everything online is moderated and controlled, the fact that the real world is awkward, uncomfortable and annoying at times feels like a personal attack. Any sense of vulnerability or cringe feels like a humiliation ritual.

The digital world warps our comfort zones and makes us less tolerant of the little indignities of life. Rather than providing an outlet for life’s challenges, it magnifies them, making it more difficult to sit in the real world with real people who aren’t filtered through digital profiles. The comfort zone social media and slop provide is dangerous and manipulative, all to sell you an escape through consumption that will never satiate your hunger.

Combatting this can’t be a solo mission. The hyper-individualism heightened by social media must be combated by acts of collectivism. You should text your friends to hang out and turn your phone off when they come over. You should go to a meeting for a club you’ve never heard of and introduce yourself.

You have to be the one to reach out, to extend a hand of companionship away from the individualist digital world. Go to the club, make mistakes and regret them the next day, get rejected by someone, go to an event by yourself and make friends there.