Go ahead, type "sus" into your search bar. I'll wait.
What you'll find is a digital monument to our collective idiocy. A tidal wave of garishly colored cartoon astronauts, blinking GIFs, and endless articles explaining the "sus meaning" to people who have apparently never heard the word "suspicious." It's the linguistic residue of a video game, Among Us, that has so completely saturated our online world that it's rendered a simple three-letter word almost useless for anything else.
And I'm not just being a cranky Luddite complaining about memes. This isn't some harmless bit of internet fun. It's a symptom of a deeper sickness, a digital brain rot where context goes to die. Because while the internet is busy churning out another "sus face" meme, real, important things that happen to share those three letters are being buried alive.
A Collision of Worlds Nobody Asked For
Imagine you’re Dr. Dai Chung. You're a world-renowned pediatric surgeon. You've spent decades of your life researching neuroblastoma, developing therapies for one of the most terrifying cancers a child can face. You've published over 160 academic articles. The Society of University Surgeons—the premier organization for academic surgeons, a big deal—decides to give you its highest honor, the Lifetime Achievement Award.
So you sit down in your quiet office, the faint hum of the hospital around you, and you decide to look up the announcement. You type in "SUS Lifetime Achievement Award."
What do you get? I'm guessing it’s not a distinguished portrait of a surgeon. It's probably a bright red cartoon character with the word "SUS" plastered over it. You have to wade through a swamp of "sus videos," "sus anime," and God knows what else just to find a press release about your own life's work. How can you not feel like the world has gone completely insane?
This is a bad look. No, 'bad' doesn't cover it—this is a five-alarm dumpster fire of digital illiteracy.
And it ain't just the surgeons. There's a massive global company called SUS ENVIRONMENT. They're building these high-tech Waste-to-Energy plants in Thailand, tackling climate change and urban waste. They just captured 35% of the market there. Their press release talks about "proprietary large-grate technology" and "digital twin technology." But search for "SUS Thailand" and you're just as likely to find a travel blogger's list of "5 Sus Places in Bangkok to Avoid." It's a joke. A profoundly stupid, algorithmically-generated joke.
And the final nail in the coffin? I found a document from a governor's office, a post titled Conozca sus derechos. - Governor Bob Ferguson. That's Spanish. "Sus" means "your." It's a translation of the Bill of Rights. The damn foundation of American civil liberties. But because of a meme, even trying to search for information on your own fundamental rights in Spanish is now polluted. What does it say about our culture when the First Amendment has to compete for search ranking with a "sus gif"?
The Algorithm is the Real Impostor
Let's be real. You can't blame the gamers or the meme lords entirely. They're just doing what the internet encourages: creating loud, repetitive, low-effort content that gets clicks. The real villain here is the machine. The search algorithm is like a librarian who has completely lost their mind. Instead of organizing information by relevance, importance, or truth, they just stack the books that people are screaming about the loudest right at the front door.
The result is a total flattening of reality. A pediatric surgeon's lifetime achievement is given the same weight as a "sus dog" video. A multi-billion dollar environmental tech company is just another piece of content, no more or less important than "Roblox sus." And offcourse, the foundation of Western democracy is just another data point to be sorted next to "dandys world sus."
This is why we're drowning in garbage. It's not just about "sus." It's about how the entire digital ecosystem is designed to reward noise over substance. It’s why content farms exist, churning out endless, meaningless articles to capture keywords like "what is sus" and "sus definition." It's a system that actively punishes nuance and rewards virality. And if you think the people running these platforms are going to fix it, well...
What’s the long-term consequence of this? Are we creating a world where language itself becomes unstable, where words can be hijacked and their original meanings buried by the sheer volume of digital nonsense? When you can't even search for a professional society or a legal document without getting slimed by meme culture, what have we actually built here?
We've Gotten Exactly What We Clicked For
At the end of the day, maybe this is what we deserve. We built an information ecosystem that runs on pure, uncut engagement. We clicked the memes, we shared the GIFs, we fed the beast. And in return, it broke our language. We've traded clarity for virality, and context for clicks. So the next time you try to look up something important and get a face full of nonsense, don't blame the kids or their silly games. Just look in the mirror. We're all impostors here.