Bible sales rose to 14.2 million in 2023 from 9.7 million in 2019, and hit 13.7 million in the first 10 months of this year. Readers are also stocking up on related titles that provide guidance, insights and context—even sets of stickers to flag particularly meaningful passages. What happens a few years from now after roughly 14-15 million people bought Bibles, many of them for the first time, for two years in a row? Reading might not be the only revival we’re on the cusp of.

Brain Rot

Oxford defines Brain Rot as:

(n.) Supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as a result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration.”

If you would like something a little more concrete than that, well, here you go. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.

If you look back at the most recent Oxford words of the year, you’ll notice that they tend to name a word of the year when its trendiness is moving just beyond its peak. No one is saying “goblin mode” anymore, which was the word of the year just two years ago. If that’s right, that a word being selected as word of the year should be generally seen as the beginning of the end of a trend, then “brain rot” being chosen should be surprisingly comforting. It’s discouraging that it’s reached the cultural saturation point to be chosen, but it’s encouraging to think that this might mean there is a collective exhaustion of brain rot content. People feel as though their brains are thoroughly rotted. I’m hoping this signals a generational gasping for air in a media environment that has been suffocating them.

I’ve been saying for a long time now that social media is a distortion zone. No matter how you feel about the recent election, it seems to have proven that point. I consistently noticed that the narrative in most corners of social media was that the race was going to be close and/or Harris was going to win. And yet that obviously is nowhere near what happened in real life. There were signs pointing that way the entire time, but if you got most of your information from social media, you would have missed them.

It seems that the massive swing-and-miss of predicting this election on social media has served, at least for some, as a wake-up call to social media’s distorted reality. It’s a rude awakening for lots of Millennials and Gen Zers to find out that the online world is minuscule compared to the offline world. But there is a real opportunity here. There are people to the left and right of Christianity who are starting to bonk their rotted brains on the imminent frame and wonder if there is something more to all of this. The actual Good News is that there is. I’ll come back to that.

Books

The second data point is that Barnes & Noble, which was on the road to bankruptcy just six years ago, is about to finish opening sixty new stores this year. But it’s not just them. Indie bookstores are also on the rise again with 290 stores opening last year. Part of the reason for this, ironically, is BookTok, which is sort of a weird snake-eating-its-tale phenomenon where social media ends up driving rising book sales which leads to demand for more bookstores. There’s plenty of debate about whether BookTok is actually good for reading or not (the points made in the video linked are incredibly valid and worth considering), but the point stands that demand for books and the activity of reading is trending up, even if the quality of books isn’t what some would hope for. If social media can push people to read Bad Books, can Bad Books eventually lead people to read Good Books?

In fact, in the Morning Brew article I linked in that paragraph, they make a connection—even if just tongue in cheek—between rising book sales, new book stores, BookTok, and people’s desire to stop rotting their brains.

And while Americans are reading less than they did a generation ago, instead choosing to stare at brain rot on their phones immerse themselves in digital activities, indie bookstores have found an unlikely ally: TikTok.

Even if Morning Brew was joking, I think they’re right. BookTok is an organic example of the rare phenomenon where social media trends actually push people off of social media and into the physical world in a healthy way. People are taking up reading again to escape brain rot and it’s creating demand for more books and bookstores. Even though it might be a minority, and we still have to deal with the problem of kids barely being able to read at all, it might not be a stretch to say that we could be seeing a reading revival.

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