If you are as chronically online as I am, then it is more than likely that you will have come across the trend where people proclaim their desire to become “disgustingly educated” or “disgustingly well-read”. Content creators don their finest pair of reading glasses to affirm to their audience that they are indeed ‘intellectuals’ and display stacks of books to show off their seemingly never-ending academic reading lists. At a first glance there isn’t anything explicitly ‘wrong’ with this content. After all, wouldn’t we want to promote education in an age where school attendance, and young people’s interest in learning more generally, is in steady decline?
However, once you’ve encountered a few videos of this type, a pattern emerges. This content presents the pursuit of knowledge as an identity rather than a practice, much like the speakers’ glasses. Beyond the parading of intimidating reading lists and displays of intricately annotated pages of classic novels, there is often little engagement with the intellectual substance of the works themselves. Education becomes something to perform rather than something to participate in, something which feels incredibly dangerous in an age where a reasonable attention span and deep thinking are coming to be our most valuable assets as humans. It is more aesthetic to simply have a perfectly organised reading list, than to read said works.
Through this avoidance of actually doing the very work they promote, they ironically forgo the most important part of educating oneself: the act of learning. Learning itself is far less Instagrammable simply because learning any new skill comes with failure. Everyone will undoubtedly feel stupid at times (something which is only exacerbated in adulthood), but this is essential because learning requires mistakes. Hence, these displays of being “disgustingly educated” are less about the acquisition of knowledge than about the flaunting of interest; it is not about what the book means to you, but more what the book says about you.
This reduction of education to the superficial and the privileging of display over depth can perhaps be best observed in the world of BookTok, a popular sub-community on TikTok focused on literature, with creators often sharing reviews and recommendations. Notably, its emergence was one of the first instances in which a social media subculture had real-world impact, with BookTok heavily influencing real-world publishing trends and sales. However, in recent times the focus of BookTok appears to have shifted away from celebrating a love of reading, towards an approach to literature which casts reading as a competitive sport.
There is an increasing amount of content in which people take on reading challenges, employing the use of timers and setting targets for how many books they aim to read. The most extreme form of this intellectual performance is a trend referred to as ‘Booksmaxxing’. This is an approach which centres on maximising personal growth and intellectual capital through reading an obscenely high volume of books. The very name of the trend establishes it as a response to the popular “Looksmaxxing” culture on social media, which prizes the pursuit of physical attractiveness, often through extreme measures.
However, when the two trends are viewed in tandem, whilst their approaches and methodologies may vastly differ, the principle behind them is the same. They both centre on the performance or adoption of a particular characteristic as a means of social elevation. In the same way that ‘Looksmaxxing’ is about the improvement of physical appearance as a means of asserting superiority, in ‘Booksmaxxing’ this is translated into a performance of intellectual capital. It is less about reading for personal enjoyment and self-betterment than it is an imposition of a quantifiable framework onto personal intellect. In the same way that ‘Looksmaxxing’ marks a distinction between ‘high-’ and ‘low-value’ individuals on the basis of physical appearance, ‘Booksmaxxing’ enacts this through the display of how many books you’ve read, implicitly suggesting intelligence. In this sense ‘Booksmaxxing’ is not a rejection of shallow online culture but simply its intellectual rebranding.
A further dimension of this phenomenon becomes clear when we consider how easily it translates into comparison culture online. This ties in with the idea of being “disgustingly well-read” as a desirable characteristic. What we are seeing on social media is a glorification of a performative intellectualism in which attention becomes power and the apparent acquisition of knowledge becomes decoration. It becomes a means of asserting your superiority over others, which raises questions about privilege and access. It is crucial to explore the role which class and privilege play in discussions surrounding education and intellectual culture. Whilst we are fortunate enough to live in an age where education is universally accessible in this country, this performative intellectualism is inherently tied up with displays of privilege.
If you are flaunting the fact you can read over 200 books each year as a means of social elevation, then what you are in fact saying is that you have the time and financial capital to devote to such endeavours. Furthermore, the subjects which are often foregrounded in these pursuits toward being “disgustingly educated” are often niche subjects that one wouldn’t typically encounter in a secondary school curriculum such as philosophy or art history. In an age of ever-rising university fees, where there is a regression in terms of who can access higher education, to be able to invest this level of time and money into such subjects is a privilege.
I want to make it clear at this point that by no means am I seeking to devalue the arts. I am an English student myself and I believe that the decline of the arts in universities is a tragedy and that they are essential to our understanding of the world around us, however I simply mean that these degrees do not lead to the same kind of linear graduate career that studying a trade at college would. What is framed as intellectual ambition then begins to look less like the pursuit of knowledge and more like who can afford to have access to such education.
Ultimately, the central issue is not that people want to be ‘well-read’. After all, education is a key tool for self-betterment, as well as social mobility and liberation, and if trends such as BookTok or “Booksmaxxing” encourage more young people to pick up books and put down their phones then of course this is not without value. The danger arises when reading becomes something to be seen doing rather than something enriching in and of itself. Knowledge is not a costume you can put on for an audience, nor is it something quantifiable by stacks, timers, or yearly totals.
Perhaps the more positive alternative lies, not in abandoning these online reading communities altogether, but rather in reshaping them into spaces that encourage genuine engagement with literature. A kind of digital book club culture so to speak, centred less on how many books you can consume and more on the experience of reading itself. A community that fosters ‘real’ learning, one which is rarely neat or aesthetically pleasing; the chapter you have to read three times, the definition you pause to Google mid-sentence. To read properly, in my view, is to misunderstand, to have to sit with a text, think about it and discuss it. If these online spaces can move beyond performance and towards discussion, they may ultimately succeed in doing something genuinely valuable: making reading feel exciting, accessible, and worth sharing.
