the prison of curated intelligence
some thoughts on how we've turned intelligence into performance art
This is a bit of a random tangent, but I feel like I’ve been noticing this more and more lately so wanted to explore the idea.
I started noticing it first on Instagram—this particular breed of intellectual performance art. The carefully staged photos of obscure philosophy books next to artisanal coffee. The strategic Stories featuring foreign films with untranslated titles. The subtle flex of reading material positioned just so in the frame, as if accidentally captured while living this effortlessly cultured life.
"The most exhausting thing in life is being inauthentic." - Anne Morrow Lindbergh
It wasn't that people were sharing things they genuinely loved—that would be authentic and charming. It was something else entirely. There was this palpable sense that these cultural choices were being made specifically because they occupied that sweet spot of being "sophisticated" but not mainstream. Cool, but not cool in a way that regular people would recognize. It was intellectual hipsterism at its most transparent.
After a while, the performative nature of it all started to feel suffocating. Every book, every movie, every piece of content seemed filtered through this lens of "how will this make me appear to others?" The whole platform felt like a curated exhibition of cultural credentials rather than genuine engagement with ideas. That's part of what drew me to 𝕏—the rawness of it, the stream-of-consciousness quality where people actually wrestle with thoughts in real-time rather than just displaying the polished end products of their cultural consumption.
But the phenomenon extends far beyond social media. You encounter these people everywhere—the ones who've built their entire identity around consuming "smart things," as if intelligence were some kind of collection to be exhibited rather than a process to be lived. They're prisoners of their own self-image, constantly curating their intellectual persona for an imagined audience of cultural gatekeepers.
Watch them closely, and you'll notice they're often less concerned with actually absorbing these cultural artifacts than with being seen consuming them. The academic who sneers at their friends’ love of popular novels, dismissing them as "lowbrow" without ever considering what insights might emerge from that engagement. The culture critic who won't engage with anything too accessible, too enjoyed by too many people, missing rich opportunities for discovery.
They've created rigid hierarchies of cultural worth that actually limit their capacity for genuine insight. There's this unspoken rule that if something appeals to a broad audience, it must be intellectually suspect. As if popularity were inversely correlated with depth, as if accessibility were the enemy of sophistication.
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Stephen Hawking
This reminds me of how Umberto Eco distinguished between the "passive library"—books we own to signal cultural capital—and the "active library"—books that have actually worked on us, changed us, regardless of their supposed intellectual pedigree. Many of these performative intellectuals maintain impressive passive libraries while remaining curiously unchanged by their consumption.
The irony is profound: in their pursuit of appearing intelligent, they've constrained their actual intelligence. True intellectual agility requires permeability—the ability to extract insights from any source, whether it's Proust or podcasts, academic journals or well-crafted essays that happen to go viral. Intelligence isn't only about what you consume; it's about the lens through which you view everything.
Some of the most genuinely insightful people consume culture without these rigid hierarchies. They approach mainstream content with the same curious attention they bring to avant-garde art, looking for patterns, questioning assumptions, making unexpected connections. They're not performing intelligence; they're practicing it.
The person who finds genuine wisdom in accessible writing while maintaining intellectual humility shows more curiosity than someone who reads prestigious literary magazines primarily to maintain their cultural credentials. The thinker who can extract profound insights from popular culture demonstrates more intellectual agility than someone who name-drops theorists at parties but applies no critical thinking to their daily media consumption.
We see this everywhere: people who proudly declare their disdain for anything "too popular" as if mass appeal were inherently corrupting. People who dismiss entire categories of human expression without engagement. People who mistake cultural snobbery for discernment.
The tragedy is that this performed intellectualism actually impedes learning. When you're constantly curating your cultural consumption for an imagined audience of intellectual judges, you miss opportunities for genuine discovery. You become afraid to engage with anything that might threaten your carefully constructed image as a certain kind of thinker.
Real intelligence is messier than this. It's the willingness to look for meaning everywhere, to approach all human creation with genuine curiosity rather than predetermined judgment. It's recognizing that insight can emerge from unexpected sources and that wisdom doesn't respect our carefully constructed cultural hierarchies.
Perhaps what we're really witnessing is a confusion between intelligence and intellectual identity. The former is a practice; the latter is a performance. And those who mistake the performance for the practice often find themselves trapped in prisons of their own making, missing the very insights they claim to seek.
But here's what I've started to realize: the moment you stop caring about whether your interests make you look smart, you become exponentially more interesting. When you're free from the anxiety of intellectual status, you can follow genuine curiosity wherever it leads. You can admit what you don't understand. You can change your mind. You can find wisdom in unexpected places.
The smartest people I know share a common trait: they're utterly unconcerned with appearing smart. They ask naive questions. They get excited about little things. They'll spend an hour explaining something they just learned, not because it makes them look knowledgeable, but because they find it genuinely fascinating.
"I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious." - Einstein
This is what liberation from intellectual performance looks like: the ability to engage with ideas based on intrinsic rather than social value. To read what genuinely interests you. To admit when something popular is actually good. To approach all human creation with the same open curiosity, whether it's experimental poetry or a well-crafted shitpost.
The prison door isn't locked. We're free to step out anytime we choose to prioritize understanding over appearing to understand and genuine engagement over intellectual theater. The question is: are we brave enough to be seen as we actually are—perpetual students rather than cultural authorities, meaning-makers rather than taste-makers, human beings genuinely trying to figure things out?
"I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned." - Richard Feynman
What curiosity will you follow today, just because you felt like it? xo
As always, thanks for reading with me. Writing has been an integral part of my journey so if you enjoyed this post, please consider hitting the like button and/or sharing it to help boost its visibility. I appreciate you so much. xo
Everyone is a poser and curates their life to varying degrees. On a perhaps unrelated note, I have 2 sets of the 1965 Encyclopedia Britannica (one set white, one set brown). If you’d like one set to strategically place in your bookshelves, LMK. No charge.
This is such a timely observation Stepfanie, especially with conversations around 'point of view' and 'taste' I feel like all of a sudden everyone is trying to prove that they have something to say ... there's a sense of knowledge scarcity in these spaces, like they might run out of things to say, things that sound 'knowledgeable'