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— Written by San Choudhury
(^*This essay was originally published on San’s personal Substack)

Recently, I saw an Instagram carousel titled “How to Become Disgustingly Overeducated” with over 30k likes. The cool grey, dark-academia aesthetic – with its meticulously inked handwritten notes, classical paintings, the softly browning pages of old books, neatly kept journals – was screaming my name. It made me desperately want to have this life and be this person who does all these things.

Shortly after, I was sitting at my desk beginning work on revisions requested for an academic paper. It isn’t exactly a sexy task, but that’s just what most of my days look like as an independent scholar. Now, now. There was something about what I was sitting down to do, and the strong urges I had felt only moments before, that seemed extremely ironic.

Moments earlier, I had desperately wanted to be that person on the internet, living out the ten commandments for achieving the life of an overly educated individual. Now I was sitting down at my desk to do what I regularly do: read papers, think things through, write papers.

I realised: hang on, I am an educated person.

I have a PhD, for God’s sake. I write an essay almost every week for academic readers, and I constantly have my nose buried in some text or another. I don’t experience this life as particularly sexy – goddamnit, no I don’t. But show me an aesthetic carousel of all these things that more or less make up my everyday life, and boom – you’ve successfully manufactured an irrational desire to become an overeducated individual.

The carousel I saw explaining how to become “disgustingly overeducated” is neither unique nor particularly new. Since around 2024, there has been an influx of TikTok and Instagram content sharing similar listicles about how to achieve this kind of status. This one did say overeducated, so I suppose credit where credit is due – they’ve figured out not only how to be disgustingly educated, but overeducated.