I finally discovered what Gen Z means by ‘bed rotting’ – and I don’t like it

Bed rotting
Bed rotting

There is plenty about modern life to cause celebration and aggravation in equal measure. Thankfully, old hand Christopher Howse and young gun Guy Kelly are here to dissect the way we live now...

One of my favourite books, Illustrations of Madness by John Haslam (1810), tells of how the unfortunate James Tilly Matthews, plagued by a gang operating an Air Loom from a cellar under London Wall, was subjected to the miseries of lobster-cracking, knee-nailing, bomb-bursting and apoplexy-working-with-the-nutmeg-grater.

He did not mention bed rotting, which on TikTok has attracted 310 million views, though not mine. It must be dull viewing, for bed rotting is nothing more than a jokey name for staying in bed all day not doing much more than watching television and fiddling with a telephone. It’s very popular with people aged 12 to 27 (Gen Z) who feel burnt out, on account of lockdown and parental expectations.

It sounds to me very much like the life of bright young things in Evelyn Waugh, except that they were a trifle more gregarious. In Black Mischief, Sonia and Alastair are in bed during the day, each with a telephone and a goblet of black velvet, a backgammon board between them, and some other people in the room playing the gramophone or trying out Sonia’s make-up. It is clearly very boring. Then the dog makes a mess on the bed.

My chief objection to bed rotting personally is that eating and reading in bed are hard to do without an apparatus to raise the upper body. Florence Nightingale seemed to have had it pretty well organised when she took to her bed for 20 years in 1857. She had five servants and an amanuensis downstairs to be summoned, and a quilt served as what we now think of as a duvet, and no doubt the sheets were immovably belayed with hospital corners and laundered daily. Even so she began to feel lonely after a few years.

I don’t know. Proust wrote all those volumes of À la Recherche in the narrow bed he’d had as a child, using his knees as a desk. How did he avoid bed sores? I’m just glad to be able to roll out of bed and potter around out of doors every day, not to collect fresh copy for writing necessarily, but to counteract the natural tendency to rot.

With so much fresh Gen Z slang produced every week, it’s easy to feel panicked by not understanding a single thing a person under 25 says. In fact, it’s at the point where, if you’re not very careful, you could be tricked by some mischievous bairn.

‘Just FYI, it’s a cancellable offence to use the word “face”. We say “countenance” instead. Like Jane Austen. She gets us,’ a teenager could assure you, staring you right in the countenance. You’d have no choice but to nod and accept it. ‘Also,’ they’d continue, and you’d wince, knowing they’d got you by the throat, ‘we have a thing called “calorie-hoovering”, where you put food in your mouth, chew it and swallow. It is not the same as eating. We invented it. OK?’ Terrifying.

This seemed the case with ‘bed rotting’, which has crept from TikTok to mainstream news and instantly had millennial journalists embarrassing themselves by writing explainers as if it’s a novel wellness concept, and not just ‘a duvet day’.

One safe, judgement-free way to find out if something is real, and vaguely what it’s about, is to open Spotify, where the music streaming ogre’s algorithms create ‘personal’ playlists based around a theme. Party bangers or driving rock, say, or in my case earlier, ‘liminal hopecore Thursday afternoon’.

It’s like a toddler with a trying new passion for arts and crafts. ‘I made this for you!’ it beams. ‘Lovely, dear,’ I’ll think, ‘but you don’t know me.’ (Invariably, to my dismay, I love it.)

These days you can type in just about any phrase and it’ll have something ready for you – including all those Gen-Z terms you’ve been confused by for months. So, ‘Rizz Mix’? Mine contained quite a lot of MF Doom, the late masked rapper, and beabadoobee, the British-Filipino singer. I hope that helps. ‘Demure Mix’? Apparently that’s Lorde’s recent cover of Talking Heads’ old cover of Al Green’s Take Me to the River. Got it?

And then there’s the ‘Bed Rotting Mix’. Radiohead’s How To Disappear Completely, Elliott Smith’s Miss Misery, Mazzy Star’s I’ve Been Let Down, and somehow not a John and Yoko in sight. Now we know, then. Whatever it is, bed rotting isn’t exactly a laugh.