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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.

But if we’re being honest, almost all of these posts are nearly identical: pick a topic, create a syllabus, read for 30 minutes every day, and so on. The messaging that’s constant is this: engage in your education even when you’re no longer in an educational institution. Apart from the advice, what is also common across this genre of content is the presentation of the disgustingly educated individual and their life.

What drew me most to that carousel when I came across it that morning was the entirely material-based internet identity of the “disgustingly educated” individual. The aesthetic arrangement of objects – pens and notebooks, handwritten notes, well-thumbed books, loose sheaves of paper, margin-filled journals, PDFs, printed articles – is extremely visually appealing. It made me want to adorn myself and my life with all these things. Not because I was overcome by the practical functionality these things might offer, but because I liked the image they perform externally.

They exhibit something I can only describe as intellectual appeal.

With those in political power inciting extreme scepticism toward experts, academics, scientists, and other formal intellectual authorities, anti-intellectualism is currently at an all-time high. Even if we leave aside the political context, the way we go about our everyday lives seems to be making us dumb and dumber by the day. Beyond the constant overstimulation of our brains through the algorithmic drip-feed of dopamine as we scroll through an endless stream of overinformation – swipe – we seek hot takes over in-depth analysis, believe loud and charismatic voices over learned and reflective ones, and obsess over quantity rather than quality.

Against this backdrop, it isn’t hard to see why we are beginning to witness not only a rejection of anti-intellectual culture but also the rise of a counter-culture of intellectualism. Trends like “become disgustingly educated” are based on the promise of becoming intelligent, smart, and educated. However, the fact remains that these trends are often more concerned with the performative aspects of intelligence than with genuine engagement with education for its own sake.

First, consider the word that accompanies the phrase – disgustingly.

It is used to describe the person who is going to become educated. More importantly, this person is going to become so educated that they are almost off-putting. But off-putting to whom? To other people, of course.

What is being achieved here is the performance of education for the sake of other people. It manufactures a desire to be the smartest person in the room, to be so learned that people around you can’t help but notice it, to be so clever and witty about all manner of things that people almost find you annoying – in a way that says, “ugh, I wish I knew as much as them.” The goal is to cultivate an air of superiority, to show off how much you know.

It’s no longer sexy to simply have your nails done or your hair styled. What’s sexy now is the performance of how much you know. That is the intellectual appeal people – admittedly and secretly, including myself – are craving to possess and exhibit today in an age of rising anti-intellectualism.

These trends toward generating a culture of intellectualism are almost entirely concerned with perception and performance. Do people see me as intelligent? Do I know things, and am I talking about things that sufficiently display my intellectual appeal? The perception of being viewed as intelligent becomes more important than actually becoming an intelligent person.

What this misses is the very objective of education: the development and transformation of the self, and the cultivation of a deeper understanding of the world through critical thinking. Education is primarily an inward process, shaping the constitution of the self, rather than an external performance of a projected identity. That is not to say the two are unrelated, but the motivations behind the desire to become “disgustingly educated” are undeniably outwardly performative.

This brings me to my second point:

Because of their performative nature, these trends are also inherently underpinned by consumerism.

Returning to the objects that create the visual appeal of being educated – the pretty notebooks, books, Montblanc pens, cute glasses, and all the rest of this stuff – they fuel a desire to consume. Carrying these things, it is assumed, will make you come across as educated. They help you give off intellectual appeal. It’s not just about the things you know and talk about, but also about the things you possess and carry with you.

The promise of becoming “disgustingly educated” is founded on the rejection of universities, degrees, and other formal approaches to education. You don’t need universities to be educated anymore. But what you definitely do need, apparently, is to follow this list of five things, enrol in these online courses, and buy this guide.

I am not against education outside the university or the classroom. What I am wary of, however, is an education premised entirely upon consumption. These performances of being “disgustingly educated” involve the consumption of stuff and therefore encourage the hyper-consumption of education through the material goods that perform the overly educated identity. If you want to give off intellectual appeal, you had better look the part and dress the part. Intellectualism becomes a commodity, performed through the buying and selling of the “right” configuration of things.

All of this is to say that any effort aimed at reviving intellectual culture is welcome.

However, the performativity and consumerism surrounding trends like the ones of “disgustingly educated” risks pushing us toward a more superficial form of intellectualism.

Recently, I finished reading a book – titled The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse – about a fictional province that functions as the intellectual capital of society but is completely cut off from the outside world. The everyday common man cannot simply enter; only the most learned intellectuals are allowed to live and work there. This fictional place was imagined during a time when there was a rising tide of pseudo-intellectualism, fuelled by an obsession with mass-produced texts and consumerism. It was a period when “men came to enjoy an incredible degree of intellectual freedom, more than they could stand”. As a result, intellectual culture was gradually withdrawn from the common sphere and came to rest in the hands of a small intellectual elite within this isolated region.

As an independent scholar who has spent some time within academia, I can understand the frustration many scholars might be increasingly beginning to feel – myself included – toward forms of intellectualism grounded in performativity and consumerism. If we take our cue from The Glass Bead Game, a surge of superficial intellectualism may ultimately lead to the creation of protected enclaves of intellectual life, formed in the name of safeguarding its integrity.

The last thing we want as a society is to become divorced from a broader culture of intellectual life through our own pursuit of a shallow, performative pseudo-intellectualism popularised by trends on the internet.

If intellectual culture is to survive and thrive, it will not be because we tried to appear “disgustingly educated”.

But because we committed ourselves to the slower, less aesthetic, and far more transformative work of actually becoming educated – the kind of work that shapes a culture long before anyone realises they are living inside it.

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