Is curiosity “out of fashion” now?

Is curiosity “out of fashion” now?

Those of us who value intellect aren’t alone, but it appears that anti-intellectualism is on the rise.

Helen Higgins

Sep 29, 2026

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I saw an Instagram reel recently that was a joke about how

exhausting

it is to be attracted to intellect in the current cultural climate. It was silly and throwaway, and it was the kind of thing you scroll past without thinking, but it stayed with me. It highlighted that something in our relationship to thinking has shifted very recently.

Anti‑intellectualism is no longer loud or defiant; it’s ambient.

It hangs in the air like humidity. It’s a mood, a posture, or a subtle suspicion toward anything that asks us to sit with ambiguity or complexity for longer than a moment. It doesn’t shout; it seeps.

It’s more insidious, creeping and sinking slowly into the societal zeitgeist.

I’ve noticed there’s a refusal, dressed up as pragmatism, becoming popular, where “common sense” (ironically not so common) is viewed as morally superior. There’s been a narrowing of curiosity because if it isn’t affecting you, as the individual, directly in your daily life, then what does it matter? For those of us who value intellect, curiosity, and education, it’s an ache because the very act of attempting an understanding has become suspect.

I had a conversation with a teenager that told me he didn’t understand why people thought it was important to vote: he didn’t understand politics, didn’t care about it, and he wasn’t inclined to learn about it.

I had a chat with a barista as she was clearing tables, and she noted that I was reading. “Oh, I can’t remember the last time I attempted to read a book. I always think it’s a bit pointless waste of time when I can just get an answer from ChatGPT now.”

These are just two examples, and neither proves anything on its own, but both lingered in my mind because they felt increasingly familiar

. The rise of anti‑intellectualism isn’t simply a rejection of expertise. It’s a rejection of complexity itself. Complexity demands patience, and patience demands humility, and humility demands the admission that we don’t already know something. In a culture that treats certainty as a virtue and speed as a judged moral imperative, the willingness to remain uncertain has become a liability.

If you think slowly, you risk being left behind.

If you think deeply, you risk being dismissed as pretentious.

If you think at all, you risk being inconvenient.

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This is the part that hurts: anti‑intellectualism isn’t a war against intelligence; it’s a war against interiority.

Our interior worlds, which are the private, unmarketable, unperformable space, where thought is allowed to unfold without needing to be immediately useful, have become endangered. We’re asked to justify our thinking before we’ve even finished forming it. We are asked to produce conclusions before we’ve lived the questions.

Anything that resists simplification is treated as elitist, nuance is treated as indulgent, and if something cannot demonstrate its immediate usefulness, it’s often dismissed altogether. Instrumentalism, the belief that value lies solely in utility, has become one of the dominant cultural logics of our time. Under this framework, learning is worthwhile only if it leads to measurable outcomes, intellectual exploration becomes self-indulgence, and curiosity becomes difficult to defend. Even institutions that once championed knowledge increasingly justify themselves through markets, metrics, and economic returns. The consequence is a gradual narrowing of what we permit ourselves to value.

It’s a cultural narrowing and a slow suffocation of the interior world.

For those of us who live in the interior world, who find meaning in the slow burn of ideas, who feel most alive when confronted with something difficult, and who deeply understand that education is a lifelong orientation rather than a tick-box credential, this cultural shift feels like erosion - the persistent wearing down of the social permission to think.

Interiority isn’t just a private refuge; it’s a social resource because it’s one of the last remaining spaces where genuine thought can incubate without performance pressure. A culture that devalues interiority impoverishes individuals

and

the collective imagination. When people lose the capacity or permission to think privately, they lose the ability to contribute meaningfully to public life. Interiority is where empathy is rehearsed, where nuance is metabolised, and where contradictions are allowed to coexist long enough to become insight. Without it, we become reactive rather than reflective. A society that neglects interiority produces citizens who can’t sustain attention, tolerate ambiguity, or engage in the slow work of thinking together.

Interiority isn’t a luxury. It’s infrastructure.

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Anti‑intellectualism thrives on the fantasy that thinking is optional and that knowledge is a luxury. Curiosity is treated as a personality trait rather than a discipline. It reframes learning as something ornamental rather than essential, and the uncomfortable truth is that anti‑intellectualism is seductive. It’s hard to resist. It promises relief and simplicity. It promises the comfort of never having to confront the parts of ourselves that are unfinished, contradictory, or fragile.

I admit that I’ve sat at night and thought to myself, “Wouldn’t it be easier if I just accepted this is me now? I can watch the TV, post something on Instagram, and go about my life until the end without learning another damned thing…”

Those of us that have been dedicated to learning our entire lives know it’s not as simple as that, though. We know that curiosity is a form of courage. We know that education is a landscape instead of a ladder to climb higher in social status.

We know that intellect isn’t a performance. It’s a practice. It’s one that requires vulnerability, discipline, and the willingness to be wrong.

The rise of anti‑intellectualism forces us to confront a difficult question:

what does it mean to remain intellectually alive in a culture that rewards intellectual withdrawal?

I think we need to face the fact that our minds won’t always feel at home everywhere. Many of us have sat across from someone and realised that a conversation we long for simply isn’t possible because we’re no longer asking the same questions of the world.

How many of us have sat across from someone that’s “switched off”, and we’ve realised we don’t feel comfortable any more? That we’re no longer sitting with people who understand us? As much as it can be painful, it means refusing to apologise for the depth of our interiority.

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The work, then, is not to fight anti‑intellectualism with superiority. I have no doubt that someone in the comments will try to call me out, accuse me of being pretentious, or attempt to goad me. Superiority in these situations only feeds the narratives that anti-intellectualism relies upon. The work is to resist it with integrity, and to think openly, generously, and rigorously for a turning of the tide. My aim is to model what intellectual life looks like when it’s grounded in inquiry and to show that thinking is an invitation - not a threat.

Anti‑intellectualism may be rising, but the deeper truth is harder to face: it’s not only eroding our public discourse; it’s eroding our private selves. Those of us who value intellect or curiosity or learning aren’t simply out of fashion, we’re out of step with a culture that wants to present itself as no longer remembering what thinking is for. We’re living in a moment where the interior world is treated as anachronistic, like a relic from a slower, more demanding time in the long ago past, but the cost of that forgetting is profound. When people lose access to their interior lives, they lose access to themselves.

The devastation isn’t that anti‑intellectualism exists. It always has.

The devastation is that so many people now welcome it, relieved to be rid of the weight of their own minds.

Our task isn’t to wait for trends to change. It’s to decide whether we’ll continue to think, be curious, and seek to learn for ourselves, even when thinking is no longer in fashion.

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