Jia Tolentino Explores the Neverending Torments of Infogluttening

In her essay “My Brain Finally Broke,” New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino doesn’t so much confess a breakdown as she performs it—on the page, in real time, with all the elegance of a collapsing soufflé. She’s spiraling like a character in a Black Mirror episode who’s accidentally binge-watched the entire internet. Reality, for her, is now an unskippable TikTok ad mashed up with a conspiracy subreddit and narrated by a stoned Siri. She mistakes a marketing email from Hanna Andersson for “Hamas,” which is either a Freudian slip or a symptom of late-stage content poisoning.

The essay is a dispatch from the front lines of postmodern psychosis. COVID brain fog, phone addiction, weed regret, and the unrelenting chaos of a “post-truth, post-shame” America have fused into one delicious cognitive stew. Her phone has become a weaponized hallucination device. Her mind, sloshing with influencer memes, QAnon-adjacent headlines, and DALL·E-generated nonsense, now processes information like a blender without a lid.

She hasn’t even gotten to the fun part yet: the existential horror of not using ChatGPT. While others are letting this over-eager AI ghostwrite their résumés, soothe their insecurities, and pick their pad thai, Tolentino stares into the abyss, resisting. But she can’t help wondering—would she be more insane if she gave in and let a chatbot become her best friend, life coach, and menu whisperer? She cites Noor Al-Sibai’s unnerving article about heavy ChatGPT users developing dependency, loneliness, and depression, which sounds less like a tech trend and more like a new DSM entry.

Her conclusion? Physical reality—the sweaty, glitchy, analog mess of it—isn’t just where we recover our sanity; it’s becoming a luxury few can afford. The digital realm, with its infinite scroll of half-baked horror and curated despair, is devouring us in real time. To have the sticky-like tar of this realm coat your brain is the result of Infogluttening (info + gluttony + sickening)–a grotesque cognitive overload caused by bingeing too much content, too fast, until your brain feels like it’s gorged on deep-fried Wikipedia.

Tolentino isn’t predicting a Black Mirror future. She is the Black Mirror future, live and unfiltered, and her brain is the canary in the content mine.