How ‘Brain Rot’ and the Escapist Virtual World Is Harming Our Youth | Adnan Alkhalili

Mar 27, 2026

Adnan Al-Khalili, a Gen Z entrepreneur who founded Touch Grass Together to revive real-life rituals, talks about youth lost in immersive online worlds. He explains how excessive screen time, addictive diets, and virtual communities harm metabolic health. He describes a four-part framework — light, movement, nourishment, human connection — and how tech can be repurposed to pull young people outside.

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INSIGHT

Devices Are Reshaping Early Language And Social Learning

Al-Khalili argues many children now learn language and social cues primarily from devices rather than in-person interactions.
He cites Cocomelon and school-issued iPads/Chromebooks as examples shifting early communication to the virtual medium.

INSIGHT

The New Daily Pattern Of Digital Natives

The typical Gen Z routine often means waking in a dark room and spending entire days communicating through phones without leaving their rooms.
This lifestyle is widespread, driven by addictive algorithms and the ready availability of online platforms.

ANECDOTE

Growing Up Fully Inside Virtual Worlds

Adnan Al-Khalili grew up deeply immersed in online worlds like Discord and early virtual games, forming friendships and relationships mostly through screens.
His parents were unaware of the extent of his online life, and real-life friends often interacted only through their devices.

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Have Gen Z and Gen Alpha lost touch with the real world? Gen Z entrepreneur and founder of Touch Grass Together, Adnan Alkhalili, thinks so.

“I grew up very natively online, scarily so ... I grew up on the Discord world. I grew up on the gaming world as well ... and even the friends I had in real life, we would end up not even spending time together. We would spend all of our time online. So they‘d be in their house, I’d be in my house,” Alkhalili says.

The online world traps Gen Z into an escapist reality that their parents do not comprehend. Even good parents, he said, have no idea what their kids are doing online and to what extent they live online: “If you talk to any Gen Z and have them explain it to somebody that’s not Gen Z, the person who’s not Gen Z—maybe a later millennial and older—will actually have no idea what they’re talking about. It sounds like another language.”

Gen Z and Gen Alpha, he said, spend most of their time indoors on their devices; they don’t move much. They eat addictive processed food and drink lots of addictive energy drinks to combat tiredness.

“My metabolic health was destroyed,” he told me in our interview. “I felt like my life was over. ... I was so tired of life that I felt like I was in my 70s or 80s.”

Now he’s helping other young people exit this lifestyle with Touch Grass Together, a health and wellness initiative focused on metabolic health and real life community experiences: “We’ve come up with a framework called the touch grass moment. And ultimately, we’re trying to recreate human ritual.”

This framework, he explained, is based on four core components: light, movement, nourishment, and human connection. The goal? Getting Gen Z off their devices and out of their rooms, getting them to do things together outside such as touching grass or jumping into leaf piles and eating healthy food.

But how to achieve that? In our interview, Alkhalili talks about the constructive role technology can play in helping Gen Z to escape “brain rot” online. Is there also a constructive role for AI? What about social media? And should schools forbid smartphones?

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.