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Being chronically online in the age of AI fatigue has us all fearing for our brains. But it’s also pushing a movement of intellectualism and academic stimulation amongst Gen Z.
I divide my saved posts into folders on Instagram. Bar a few short-lived, overly aspirational extra-curriculars (cough, baking sourdough, cough), these have remained the same since I saving posts became an in-app feature. Outfit inspiration, books, recipes – the usual suspects.
But there’s been a recent addition to my roster: the anti-doomscroll folder.
It’s where I store the occasional Substack essay that actually made me think, a video essay dissecting ‘Why we’re all terminally nostalgic’, and that carousel post from a girl in New York summarising five papers on parasocial relationships. I’m not alone. Instagram is quietly turning into a virtual seminar room. Posts featuring ‘articles and essays I’ve consumed this week’ now racks up thousands of likes, complete with aesthetically annotated screenshots and captions.
We are, it seems, knowledgemaxxing.
The term, coined and explored by Polyester Zine, describes Gen Z’s reclamation of research as a leisure activity. It’s a response to what many call ‘intellectual starvation’ – a void left behind after years of degree-level stimulation and an economy that rewards productivity over purpose.
Once, we studied to secure a job. Now, we research to remember what it felt like to care about something.
After all, the irony of the modern workplace is that it leaves little room for curiosity. Many of us spend our days performing competence on Slack, only to clock off and dive into Substacks about postmodernism or watch YouTube explainers on Cold War aesthetics.
The rise of longform newsletters and podcasts isn’t simply a content trend; it’s a rebellion against the cultural erosion of attention.
As Bloomberg recently noted, Substack is doing what podcasts did a decade ago – creating digital spaces for the over-stimulated and under-challenged to engage with big ideas. In a landscape built on TikTok soundbites and algorithmic mush, the act of reading a 3,000-word essay feels almost radical. Intellectual consumption has become the new self-care.
It’s also a quiet rejection of the internet’s anti-intellectual turn. Where the early 2010s glorified relatability, today’s young people are revelling in elitism. Or at least, a stylised version of it.
Reading lists are aesthetic now. Just look at Goodreads, where people post their updates like outfit pics, or Substack, which has become a barometer of taste much like Instagram.
There’s something oddly comforting about this shift. For a generation caricatured as screen-addicted and politically apathetic, the resurgence of curiosity suggests otherwise. The same people accused of killing literature are now driving the revival of it, albeit through digital platforms.
