Memes make this even worse. Wojaks, in particular, feel like they've undergone a kind of memetic selection for maximum outrage, disgust, and grotesqueness. Their caricatures are more viscerally repulsive than historical propaganda imagery, and unlike older propaganda, which often looks cartoonish and recognisably exaggerated, these images seem designed to provoke the strongest possible reaction via memetic selection. Brainrot content works the same way, and people posting these brainrots are same people psychoanalysing you, I've been a troll myself when I was a teenager, who has ever felt happy for making someone's day worse online, it's like we are so obsessed with making others feel bad but also we ought not to pretend that we are, because that's cringe, so we cope by calling our work "trolling", trust me you never feel good about it, you laugh and your cortisol goes up. (jokes aren't all about "fun", neither is addiction but that's a different topic)

What frustrates me is how this all feeds into the same culture because everything becomes a caricature, controversy, psychological diagnosis, or political/moral statement. I'd like to be normal, and have normal conversations, I'd like to see people engage with things more directly, without the compulsive brainrot.