Delulu. Girl Dinner. And the Rest.
Delulu.
Girl Dinner.
And the Rest.
Every internet term you've been nodding along to without being entirely sure you could define it. Defined. With no condescension whatsoever.
At some point in the last few years, the internet developed its own language for a very specific kind of internal experience — the experience of being a woman trying to live her life with some degree of dignity while simultaneously not taking any of it too seriously.
These words are not slang in the traditional sense. They are not abbreviations or code. They are precise emotional shorthand for things that were previously difficult to articulate quickly — the specific joy of a plate of miscellaneous snacks at 9pm, the particular delusion required to keep pursuing something that probably isn't going to happen, the fatigue of a self that has been online for too long.
Here is all of it, explained properly, with the Brewtiful take on what each one actually reveals about us.
Derived from "delusional." The practice of maintaining an unrealistically optimistic belief — about a crush, a situationship, a career outcome, a life circumstance — in the face of evidence that does not support it. To be delulu is to choose the best possible interpretation of ambiguous information and run with it.
Delulu originated in K-pop fandom communities, where fans would construct elaborate theories about celebrities being in love with them. It was originally a criticism — calling someone delulu meant calling them unhinged. Then something interesting happened: the term got reclaimed. Because it turns out that the line between delusional and manifesting is very thin, and sometimes the only difference between people who get what they want and people who don't is that the first group refused to stop believing they would.
We've covered this territory before — there are different types of delulu, and not all of them are equally useful. The kind where you convince yourself the situationship is going somewhere it isn't? Harmful delulu. The kind where you apply for the job you're slightly underqualified for because you decide you'll figure it out? Productive delulu. The distinction matters.
"He hasn't texted back in four days but I'm staying delulu — he's probably just busy with something important." / "I applied to the senior role even though I only have two years of experience. Delulu is the solulu."
The associated phrase "delulu is the solulu" — being delusional is the solution — is the philosophical endpoint. It acknowledges the irrationality while endorsing it anyway. Which is honestly just another word for hope, said with more self-awareness.
A meal consisting of miscellaneous snacks, fridge remnants, and random items assembled without cooking effort or nutritional intent. Classic examples: cheese and crackers with grapes. Cold pasta from the container. Hummus, some olives, half a cucumber. Cereal at 9pm. Whatever exists, arranged loosely on a plate or eaten standing up over the sink.
The term was coined on TikTok in 2023 by creator Olivia Maher, who posted a video of her dinner — a glass of wine, some cheese, a piece of bread, a few cornichons — and called it "girl dinner." It went viral immediately because it named something women were already doing but had never articulated: the quiet, satisfying refusal to make a proper meal when you don't have the energy and you're only cooking for yourself.
Girl dinner is not a recipe. It is not a diet. It is an act of small rebellion against the expectation that meals must be cooked, plated, balanced, and nutritionally complete to count as real. It is permission to feed yourself however works, and feel entirely satisfied about it.
Cheese board assembly with whatever's in the fridge · Cold leftover pasta eaten from the container · Hummus + vegetables + pita + nothing else · A boiled egg, some crackers, and fruit · Popcorn as dinner, with a side of popcorn · Cereal, but make it intentional
The reason girl dinner resonated so widely is not because the food is interesting. It's because the permission is interesting. You are allowed to eat cheese and crackers for dinner. You are allowed to not cook. You are allowed to feed yourself something small and random and call it done. The Sunday reset culture and girl dinner culture are two sides of the same coin — one is effort, the other is the deliberate absence of it.
These words are not slang. They are emotional shorthand for things that were previously very hard to say quickly. Which is why they spread so fast.
A lifestyle philosophy centered on ease, comfort, pleasure, and the deliberate rejection of unnecessary struggle. Prioritizing rest, beautiful environments, and experiences that feel good — and actively deprioritizing grinding, suffering, and the cultural belief that hardship is morally superior to comfort.
Soft life originated in Nigerian internet culture and spread globally as a direct counter to hustle culture — the early-2010s ethos that valorised grinding, 4am wake-ups, suffering for success, and treating exhaustion as a badge of honor. Soft life says: what if instead of that, we just... didn't?
Living soft doesn't necessarily mean living expensively. It means choosing the gentler option where possible — the longer route that's prettier, the restaurant instead of cooking, the afternoon nap, the thing you actually want to do instead of the thing you feel you should. It is anti-martyrdom. It is choosing pleasure without apologising for it. The opposite of soft life is that feeling at 4pm on Sunday when the week is already in the room with you — soft life is refusing to let it in quite so early.
"I cancelled the plans, ran a bath, ordered food, and watched three hours of television. Soft life era and I'm not explaining myself."
A person whose worldview, sense of humor, references, and understanding of what is normal have been significantly shaped — and arguably distorted — by excessive time spent on the internet. Chronically online people treat Twitter discourse as real-world events, reference obscure memes in face-to-face conversations, and are sometimes surprised to discover that most people have not heard of the thing they consider extremely obvious.
Chronically online is usually deployed as mild criticism — implying that someone has lost touch with how the world actually works by spending too much time in algorithmically curated digital spaces. But it has also been reclaimed enthusiastically by the very people it describes, who wear it as a badge of cultural fluency.
The honest truth is that being chronically online has some real benefits — you tend to encounter ideas, conversations, and cultural shifts earlier than most. The downside is the occasional inability to gauge how niche your references are, and a tendency to treat the intensity of online discourse as reflective of real-world stakes. The dating app era, which is now officially dying, was built almost entirely on chronically online people applying their extremely online preferences to real human beings — which explains a lot.
"She explained the lore of a years-long Twitter beef to her grandmother at Christmas dinner for twenty minutes. Chronically online. Helplessly, completely online."
A TikTok trend originating in 2023 in which women asked their male partners how often they think about the Roman Empire — and discovered, to widespread astonishment, that many men think about it very regularly. The Roman Empire became shorthand for the specific category of thing that occupies significant mental real estate for one person without their partner having any idea.
The original trend revealed a genuinely funny asymmetry: men apparently spend a non-trivial amount of time thinking about Roman aqueducts, legions, and empire logistics, while their female partners had never considered this as a possibility. The follow-up conversation was: what is the female equivalent?
The answer varied wildly — the specific social dynamics of a high school situation from fifteen years ago, a conversation that went slightly wrong at a party in 2019, the logistics of how you'd survive if you were suddenly transported to a random historical period — but the point landed. Everyone has a Roman Empire. It's just that most of us never say it out loud.
"Apparently he thinks about the fall of Rome approximately twice a week. I've been thinking about whether I was rude to a barista in 2018. We contain multitudes."
The internet didn't invent these feelings. It just finally gave them names short enough to fit in a caption.
The sudden, visceral, often completely irrational loss of attraction toward someone you were previously interested in, triggered by a specific — usually small and objectively harmless — behaviour or characteristic. Once the ick arrives, it cannot be reversed. The attraction is simply gone.
The ick is not a red flag. Red flags are signals of genuine incompatibility or danger. The ick is something more mysterious: the moment when your nervous system decides, without consulting you, that it is finished. Classic ick triggers include: a grown man running excitedly to catch up with you, someone ordering food in a specific tone of voice, the way someone laughs at their own jokes just slightly too soon, an unexpectedly childish email sign-off.
The ick is real, it is powerful, and it is not entirely rational — which is what makes it useful as a concept. It names the experience of being put off by something you cannot entirely justify, without requiring you to justify it. Dating apps have made the ick considerably worse, because they give you access to so many options that the threshold for what triggers it has dropped significantly. When there are infinite alternatives, the bar for the ick gets lower and lower.
"He waved at his reflection when we passed a shop window. Not at me. At himself. I got the ick so fast I nearly left my body. It was over."
A minimum 30-minute outdoor walk during which you are permitted to think about only four things: your goals, what you're grateful for, how attractive you are, and how you can better yourself. Phones allowed for music or podcasts. Social media scrolling not allowed. The hot girl walk is equal parts exercise, meditation, and extremely specific positive delusion.
The hot girl walk was coined by TikToker Mia Lind in 2021 and became one of the more genuinely useful wellness trends the internet has produced — partly because the bar is low (it's a walk), partly because the framing is perfect. You don't have to go to the gym. You don't have to do anything difficult. You just go outside and think about your goals and how good you are.
What it actually is, stripped of the branding, is a structured mindfulness walk — the specific prohibition on thinking about your problems and the specific instruction to think about your potential is doing real psychological work. It is delulu applied to movement. Which makes it both ridiculous and genuinely effective, which is the best possible combination.
"I was catastrophising at 7am so I put my headphones in, went outside, and did a hot girl walk. I thought about my goals for forty minutes. I came back a slightly different person. I cannot fully explain it."
The perceived deterioration of mental capacity, attention span, and cultural taste resulting from excessive consumption of low-quality, algorithmically optimised internet content. Brain rot content is fast, absurd, often incomprehensible to anyone outside the specific online community that created it, and extremely compelling in the moment. Brain rot is both a diagnosis and a genre.
Oxford University Press named "brain rot" its Word of the Year for 2024, which is either a sign that the concept has entered mainstream consciousness or proof that even the most prestigious institutions in the English language have brain rot now. Probably both.
Brain rot content includes: extremely fast TikTok edits with no coherent narrative, memes that require twenty layers of ironic context to understand, videos of things happening for no reason that nonetheless hold your attention for ninety seconds, and the specific genre of content where someone is just talking very fast about something that doesn't matter. The defining feature of brain rot is that it is simultaneously not worth your time and extremely hard to stop watching.
Having brain rot has become, in many online communities, something to admit freely and even celebrate — it signals fluency in current internet culture, even if that fluency comes at the cost of having read a full paragraph without getting distracted in approximately eight months.
"I spent forty minutes watching fifteen-second videos of a man reorganising his desk. I don't know his name. I don't know why I watched. My brain is fully rotted. I am at peace with this."
