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From Substack to explainer TikToks, everyone’s craving thought-provoking content. But is our hankering for brain food a reaction to AI or evidence of a deeper desire for fulfillment in the modern age?
What is a ‘thinkfluencer’? Consider them the talking head in your pocket: a bastion of knowledge on often niche topics, sharing facts and figures with the help of a teeny tiny handheld mic. These types of influencers have trickled from the margins to the mainstream in the past year, satiating a societal hunger for learning.
This desire to ‘go back to school’ as it were, is perhaps a routine part of growing up. We leave the structure of the classroom and after surviving the terrifying first stint of professional life, the subsequent sense of comfort can start to feel boring.
Waking up with the same to-do list, same colleagues, and same coffee order quickly gets old. And while chasing career goals is always a motivating part of adulting, the depressing state of our economy is making 9-5 development more elusive.
This craving to feed the brain beyond our work desks can be seen in the rise of apps like Substack. The niche newsletter site was hardly the top contender for social platform du jour, but that hasn’t stopped everyone from brands to celebrities flocking to share their inner thoughts. Even Kylie Jenner recently dabbled with the idea.
It’s also easy to pin this phenomenon on AI. Shortform content, the ability to delegate our human capacity to just think a thought, all of the brain smoothing consequences of ultra convenience – these things make long form, educational content more appealing.
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But as Laura Pitcher explored for DAZED, the pressure to churn out these expansive formats has driven ‘thinkfluencers’ right into AI’s arms. ‘All of this exists on platforms that reward speed and consistency,’ writes Pitcher. ‘[This is] often at the expense of depth [and] that pressure is also pushing some creators towards using AI to generate their scripts.’
Our search for knowledge exists in parallel to a worsening literacy crisis. Young people are spending more time on screens and forgetting how to write by hand, and schools are swapping fully-fledged texts for short nuggets of literature in order to retain students’ short attention spans.
Even at Harvard, one of the leading universities worldwide which boasts some of the greatest minds on our planet, students are struggling to unpack texts that were only recently considered fundamental to a literature syllabus.
