The "disgustingly well read" trend won't make you well read.

[00:00:00]So, you want to be a disgustingly well-read girly. These are books you need to be reading if you want to become disgustingly educated.

[00:00:05]>> want to be disgustingly well-read >> Here is how to be a disgustingly educated.

[00:00:09]>> Disgustingly >> The desire to be disgustingly [music] well-read or disgustingly well-educated will not make you well-read or well-educated. Disgustingly well-read is an identity, not a lifestyle, and it's an identity that frankly is antithetical to the goals of literacy and education.

[00:00:28]Over the past 8 months to a year or so, there's been a trend making its rounds on BookTok, Tube, and Gram. Short videos wherein the creator list books you should read if you want to be disgustingly well-read or over-educated.

[00:00:42]The videos or Instagram carousels in some cases often feature aesthetically pleasing bookshelves, cozy clothing, and coffee mugs, or other imagery that evokes studiousness and intelligence.

[00:00:54]The majority of the recommendations are works of classical literature, philosophy, critical theory, uh academic non-fiction, books that are indeed highly educational. However, there's usually little reasoning provided as to why these specific books are the ones that will make you well-read beyond a quick blurb or two. And I suspect this is because these videos are not really trying to sell you the impassioned pursuit of knowledge, even if the creators think they are. They're selling an aspiration, an aesthetic. So, today I want to break down what this trend is doing, why that's a problem, what a well-read life actually entails, [music] and the one question you should ask yourself if a life of the mind is what you desire. Now, to be abundantly clear before we get into it, I have no doubt that all of the creators I'm clipping in this video have nothing but good intentions. My critique is not with the individuals who participate in the trend, but rather the language and the format of the trend itself [music] and how it ultimately fails people who have a genuine desire to learn and reclaim their brains. Cuz that's the issue. The desire is genuine. This is not performative reading or performative education, but the solution as presented here is ultimately insufficient and unsustainable. Let's start with the keyword here, disgusting.

[00:02:13]>> DISGUSTING.

[00:02:15]>> I find the choice of a disgusting simultaneously fascinating and very concerning because it reveals so much about this particular perspective on learning and reading. As per Merriam-Webster, disgust, noun, marked aversion aroused by something highly distasteful, repugnance.

[00:02:35]Disgust, verb, to provoke loathing, repugnance, or aversion, be offensive to. Disgust is an inherently negative emotion, and in fact, it's one of the seven universal primary emotions, meaning that all human beings experience it regardless of their cultural background. Specifically, disgust works as a sort of a behavioral immune system that prompts the disgusted person to avoid or reject a contagion. Like, you know when you've had leftovers sitting in your fridge for a few days, and you take a quick whiff just to make sure they're still edible, and if they smell nasty, you toss them? That's the disgust response protecting you from eating contaminated food and getting sick. So, why would someone want to be disgusting?

[00:03:19]Because that's what disgustingly well-read means in its most literal sense, to be so well-read, so highly educated that you inspire disgust in another person. And because we know that the purpose of disgust is avoidance and rejection, wouldn't that mean that the disgustingly well-read person would be rejected by the people around them, or at least kind of held at arm's length?

[00:03:44]By its very nature, yes. Yes, it does.

[00:03:47]And in fact, one video I came across states that explicitly as the goal.

[00:03:51]>> Buy books to become disgustingly profound that people will treat you like an alien.

[00:03:55]>> How can that possibly be a good thing?

[00:03:58]Honestly, I found it downright weird.

[00:04:00]Now, realistically, I highly doubt that anyone participating in this trend consciously desires to be disgusting in its most visceral and repugnant sense.

[00:04:09]Instead, I suspect that the true desire here is not to inspire disgust in others, but to inspire envy. So much envy that it becomes resentment, which might feel like disgust. But real quick, I want to take a second to thank the sponsor of this video, Scrollie.

[00:04:25]Scrollie is a physical screen time blocker that you cannot cheat your way around, which we are all guilty of doing. If you want to unlock your apps, you'll have to have your Scrollie on hand. No sneaking around in your settings. Just keep him somewhere out of reach while you're reading, studying, or doing any other focused activity, and you're sure to have a satisfying and productive session. So, go to scrollieapp.io or click the link in the description to get your Scrollie today. So, why would a high level of education inspire envy?

[00:04:53]Because education is a form of cultural capital, which is a term coined by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.

[00:04:59]Simply put, a non-financial asset that helps people succeed in society. Some more examples of knowledge as cultural capital are university degrees, access to books, whether that's from a public library or a personal collection, specialist qualifications, or even simply speaking in a way that sounds educated. But if intelligence is cultural capital, it's capital that's becoming increasingly inaccessible. In March of this year, at BlackRock's US Infrastructure Summit, OpenAI founder Sam Altman hit us with this downright evil quote, "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter." In this dystopia that Altman longs for, the people are all but brain dead and can only access intelligence if they have the financial means to purchase it. So, it stands to reason that people who are already intelligent and educated would be part of an elite class. They'd have an innate intellectual wealth, which means more cultural capital, which means more power and access in society. The gap between the intellectual elite and the brain-rotted masses would be a cavern.

[00:06:08]Now, maybe I'm naive, but I doubt that Altman will succeed in achieving this future where intelligence is literally metered out and we all start buying like 10 units of smartness a week or something. He and the rest of the tech billionaires are absolutely going to try their best to do so, and I think on some level most of us plebs are aware that we're being intentionally dumbed down by the powers that be. And so, to bring it back to the disgustingly well-read trend, we want to break away and enter that elite class. The implicit promise of the trend is that by reading enough of the right books or studying enough of the right topics, we'll be rewarded with upward movement in a social or cultural hierarchy. And by extension, the people who aren't well-read or well-educated will be left behind and will not be granted this upward movement, and they in turn will be envious of or disgusted by us. Although this cultural capital idea is largely speculation of mine, I don't think it's unfounded. While watching some of the disgustingly well-read videos, I came across a subset of this trend that are super short videos around 10 seconds that were a montage of academic aesthetic clips with a text overlay reading, "The goal is to be extremely beautiful and disgustingly overeducated." I wasn't expecting to find this little subgenre, and I think it's very interesting and telling that they explicitly make the connection between education and appearance and beauty, that is to say, desirability. Of the two videos I just showed, on YouTube Shorts alone, one has well over a million views, and the other is a very nearly 1 million. This tells me that the disgustingly well-read or overeducated identity is extremely appealing to people, even if there is no actual literary or academic substance present.

[00:08:01]There are no book recommendations here, just images of books, and millions of viewers want, at the very least, to be associated with those images. All of that is to say, the goal of the disgustingly well-read trend is to be a certain kind of person, and more importantly, to be seen as that kind of person. This is a form of extrinsic motivation, meaning the reward a person is working towards comes from outside the individual. In this case, someone else needs to validate the well-read or the well-educated identity, and that validation is the reward for reading and studying. Some other examples of extrinsic motivation are money, grades or degrees, jobs, awards, prizes, championships, etc. The opposite of extrinsic motivation is intrinsic, and if you guessed that intrinsic rewards come from within the individual, congratulations, you are correct.

[00:08:56]Intrinsic rewards are a lot more abstract, things like pride, purpose, curiosity, joy, mastery of a skill, but they're more solid and sustainable rewards in the long term, especially for deeply focused and complex tasks like reading and studying. That's because extrinsic rewards rely on others to provide them, and especially when it comes to a reward like validation, as opposed to a weekly paycheck, there is no guarantee that that reward will come.

[00:09:25]For example, if your only goal in, say, learning to play tennis is to win the Wimbledon, but you lose every match you play, will you continue? Probably not.

[00:09:36]But if your goal is simply fun and exercise, then you'll probably keep showing up. If your goal in reading is to be seen as a reader, but no one is watching your Tik Tok or liking your good reads review, will you feel accomplished? Probably not. And, if you don't feel accomplished, will you pick up that next difficult book? Probably not. Conversely, if your goal in reading is just personal curiosity, let's say you were fascinated by Greek mythology as a kid, and now you want to know everything there is to know about it, you're far more likely to keep reading and studying in the long term because the satisfying of that curiosity is the reward. And, you don't need to rely on others to give it to you because you're giving it to yourself. A minute ago, I talked about the aesthetic nature of the disgustingly well-read trend and how the inside rewards are based in appearance and identity, but I want to be clear again that that doesn't mean that the people partaking in the trend are performing reading or education. I've been alive for long enough to know that people who truly do not give a about reading or education are not going to spend the time and energy pretending to just so they can reap some abstract cultural reward in the indeterminate future. I believe the desires of both the creators and the viewers are genuine. The problem is that the short-form social media format doesn't allow newer, curious readers to explore their desires and identify why this really matters to them beyond the idea of inhabiting an appealing identity.

[00:11:10]Video platforms are, of course, best at promoting the visual. To go back to those extremely beautiful and disgustingly smart clips I showed you a minute ago, one of the creators, Fay Films, has a whole study advice channel with over 1.5 million subscribers. So, her desire for education can't be performative because she's literally doing it. And, I'm not too familiar, but if I'm not mistaken, she studies or studied immunology, which is very cool.

[00:11:36]And I bet she's smart enough to know that a bookish aesthetic 10-second clip is going to get way more views than a long video sitting in an awkward aesthetic corner of a basement extolling the virtues of literacy and education and encouraging viewers to go deep and examine their personal motivations for learning. A video that easily allows viewers to imagine themselves being the smartest and most beautiful person in the room is way sexier. And so, intrinsic rewards are especially necessary not only because external rewards are unreliable, but because the real everyday work of reading, learning, writing, studying is often not aesthetically pleasing and sometimes not even very fun. It's not all dark academia, cozy core vibes, and taking notes with a fountain pen while sipping herbal tea, though sometimes it is. But, it's more often squeezing in reading time after a stressful day and you're already drained, struggling with a concept but having no one to help you, only managing to read 15 pages when your goal was 50 and feeling defeated, or even just the isolation that comes with an inherently solitary pursuit. Reading and learning are slow and deliberate processes that, in reality, offer very little in the way of external rewards, especially if your education is self-directed outside of an academic institution. It's the [clears throat] self-satisfaction, whatever exactly that may be for you, that will keep you coming back on those unappealing days over the course of several years, or preferably the rest of your life. I'm now at the portion of the video where I would like to offer some sort of alternative or solution, but the tricky thing here is that those intrinsic motivations are so individual and so personal that they can only come from inside of you. Tik Tok can't tell you what they are. I can't tell you. Your friends, family, partners, professors can't tell you. But, what I can tell you are what my personal motivations are and the hope that they illustrate the the whole core of my argument here. I published an essay on my Substack a few weeks ago that goes into one of the reasons why literature still matters in this day and age. And that goes into more details than I will here, but essentially, as someone who struggled with pretty severe social anxiety disorder ever since childhood, books have always been the medium through which I can understand the world and other people, which I cannot do by interacting with them for reasons still unknown. And although reading now is less of this like a vital lifeline than it was when I was 12, I still see every new book or every new study topic as a new way to connect with others. And that's why I always say I'm truly open to reading things by or about absolutely any kind of person. There is no one I don't want to hear from. And so, my most recent example is as some of you know, my main literary project this year is to read the Bible for the first time, being that it's pretty much objectively the most influential book ever written and not having at least a working knowledge of it is a massive weak spot in my understanding of literature, culture, and history as a whole. Strengthening that weak spot is rewarding in and of itself. But, even more rewarding is how much closer I feel to the handful of religious people in my life even in just the six months that I've been doing this. In fact, my brother is a practicing Christian and has been for seven or eight years now, even though we were raised secular. And the depth of conversation we've been able to have since I started studying the Bible simply could not have happened if I hadn't. And it's genuinely strengthened our relationship. And I cherish that, truly. That's what keeps me coming back every day, even when I'm totally confused and have no idea who any of these people are or what's going on and the most gruesome thing you can imagine just happened. Come to think of it, this is actually the opposite of being disgustingly well-read because it's brought two people closer together rather than pushing them apart. And that is, or should be in my opinion, the ultimate goal of reading and learning.

[00:16:02]So, maybe that little anecdote speaks to you, maybe it doesn't. Either way, I think the best I can do is leave you with this question. If no one was watching, why would you read or learn?

[00:16:13]There's this fantastic episode of The Twilight Zone uh original series, one of the best shows ever made in my opinion, called Time Enough at Last, in which a bookish bank teller named Henry longs for uninterrupted time to read to his heart's content. He ultimately gets his wish, but and spoiler alert here, he ends up being the last person on Earth.

[00:16:34]There is literally no one left to praise him or validate him or to confer any cultural capital upon him. And yet, he still goes into the library. He still wants to read and learn. Put yourself in that perspective. If the rewards for reading could only be internal, if you had no other options, what would they be?

[00:16:57]Or would you even do it? I'm realizing maybe this isn't the best thought experiment example because even my motivations wouldn't work because you can't connect to people who don't exist anymore, but you know what I mean. Is the disgustingly well-read trend malicious in any way? No, of course not. And in fact, I think many of these creators' recommendations are actually quite good. But, I do think it's misguided because it doesn't convey the depth of motivation and commitment needed to sustain a life of the mind because it can't. And, in turn, it sets would-be lifelong readers and learners up for overwhelm and disappointment.

[00:17:35]What the trend fails to understand is that well-read or well-educated is not a destination you finally arrive at after you've read the perfect number of the perfect books. Rather, it's the process of showing up every day with curiosity and an open mind, and then putting what you've learned into practice in the world. Well, that is it for me today.

[00:17:56]Thank you all so very much for spending your time with me here on Thought Couture. If you made it all the way to the end and you're new around here, hello. I'm Joe, and on this channel we work to rebuild a creative, thoughtful lives despite living in the age of distraction. So, if that sounds like something you want to do as well, I would be honored if you subscribed. You can also check out my Substack newsletter, linked down below, where you'll find more extensive literary discussions, creative writing advice, and essays on reading as personal transformation. If you enjoyed this video, please consider giving it a like.

[00:18:29]That is the easiest and fastest way to help support the channel. And, if you're still in the mood for watching another one similar to this, uh you might enjoy either of these two. I will let you go now. I thank you again for watching. I hope you have a lovely rest of your day, and I will see you in the next one.