There’s a particular expression people make when you use the phrase “epistemological crisis” at a dinner party. It’s the same look your cat gives you when you try to explain taxes. The pupils dilate. The soul briefly reboots. Somewhere, a tiny flute plays a single distressed note. And then, like clockwork, someone says, “Wow, you’re really intense,” as if the crime of the century were simply asking what evidence would change their mind.

Friends, I’m not intense. I’m just dehydrated from wading through a culture that thinks a hot take is a food group.

Remember when pop culture sometimes tried to teach you something? When a movie might accidentally have a thesis? Now we have Cinematic Universes so large they require zoning permits, yet the plots could be summarized by a Labradoodle with a whiteboard: “Good punch bad. Quip. Sky beam.”

The charts are ruled by songs that rhyme “vibe” with “vibe” and then—boldly—rhyme it again. We stage worldwide listening parties for tracks that are basically two adverbs and a sponsored dance move. If Beethoven rose from the grave today, he’d return to it voluntarily by the third pre-chorus.

I’m not asking for every sitcom to pause for a lecture on Hume. I’m just saying maybe once—once!—a character could read a book that isn’t a prop shaped like a book that’s actually a Bluetooth speaker that’s actually… another vibe.

The original promise of social media was delightful: “Connect with friends! Share ideas! See what your aunt thinks about tomatoes!” What we got is an attention casino where the house always wins and the slot machine is your cortex. The timeline is a buffet where everything is either frosted rage or frosted despair, and the soft-serve machine dispenses “hot controversy” in one flavor: faintly vanilla with notes of outrage.

Threads that start with “Not to be controversial, but…” should be prosecuted by The Hague. The platform’s reward system is Pavlovian; we’re all dogs now, aggressively refreshing to see if our joke about metaphysics got more than seven pity hearts and a reply-bot offering crypto.

The discourse keeps getting faster because slowness is expensive and nuance doesn’t trend. We’ve gamified insight into collectible dopamine stickers. If Plato had a TikTok, someone would stitch his cave allegory with, “This but for outfit aesthetics??” and end with “No nuance, just vibes.”

Romance in the era of infinite scroll is an exquisite contradiction: we want deep connection at 1.5x playback speed. We’ve turned courtship into a UX problem, and the UX team shipped a hotfix called “ghosting.” Dating profiles read like enterprise license agreements—boilerplate, vague, suspiciously error-prone. “Love long walks.” Yes. So does literally every mammal.

We evaluate potential partners the way we buy plug-ins: skim the features, check a few stars, and assume the tricky bits will be resolved in a future update. We’ve replaced the awkward joy of getting to know someone with the measurable safety of a rubric: “What’s your attachment style, Hogwarts house, and Enneagram number?” (Hot take: if you need a personality sorting hat, the problem may not be your house.)

The anti-intellectual part isn’t that we enjoy silly memes (I do), or that we don’t bring index cards to brunch (I only do that on anniversaries); it’s that curiosity itself—asking a better question, reading the extra page, pausing before we hit send—feels like showing weakness. We treat thinking like a red flag. “He brought up Kant on the second date.” That’s not a red flag; that’s a free appetizer.

Oh, I get it. Brains are calorie-hungry. Phones glow like benevolent UFOs. Algorithms are very good at reverse-engineering our half-sincere impulses into entire afternoons. But we have agency! (Allegedly. Debates continue in the comments.) And being “intellectual” isn’t about being a snob at a used bookstore, sighing theatrically near the translations. It’s about curiosity. It’s the radical act of staying with a thought long enough to see where it breaks, then following the crack into something truer.

I’m not above it. I have doomscrolled so hard I saw the curvature of the earth. I have nodded at a podcast summary as if I read the actual book. I once pretended to understand a thread about LLMs while holding a spatula for moral support. None of us is pure. But some of us are at least trying to put our mental furniture on sliders and rearrange the room. Need help with that? Try one or more of these:

  • Adopt a “Two Scroll Rule.” Before you post, read two counterarguments—good ones, not strawmen in flip-flops. If you still want to post, congratulations: you’re now at Level 2 Internet.
  • Date with questions, not quizzes. Try: “What’s something you changed your mind about in the last year?” If they answer “nothing,” you’ve learned everything.
  • Have one Long Thing going. A novel, a documentary longer than a dentist visit, a gnarly essay. Let it stretch your attention like pizza dough—uneven at first, then surprisingly delicious.
  • Schedule recreational silence. Ten minutes. No audio, no “productivity,” just the thrilling, terrifying hum of your own unsponsored thoughts.
  • Upgrade your compliments. Less “you’re hot,” more “that’s a fascinating inference.” It’s astonishing how attractive “I never thought of it that way” sounds in the wild.

Only if the gate is marked “No Curiosity Allowed.” This isn’t about IQ; it’s about questions asked per minute. Curiosity is the cheapest luxury item you’ll ever own. It pairs with everything. It never goes out of style. It’s a universal adapter for people.

Gatekeeping says, “You can’t sit with us.” Curiosity says, “Pull up a chair; tell me why you think that—and what would change your mind.” If a conversation can’t survive a follow-up question, it was a vibe in a tuxedo anyway.

If this sounds exhausting, that’s because everything worth doing is fueled by the same stuff as a good stew: time, heat, and patience. We can still love dumb fun (please, yes, always). But we can also keep a candle lit for big, slow, luminous thinking. It’s not elitist to like your ideas al dente.

The world will keep serving us pre-chewed content on a conveyor belt. The algorithm will keep offering dessert for breakfast, lunch, and unhinged midnight snacks. We can politely decline, sometimes. We can cook. We can talk. We can ask a better question and stay for the answer, even if it makes our eyebrows do yoga.

And if someone at the party says, “You’re really intense,” just smile. Offer them a sip of water. Then ask them their favorite wrong idea, and why they loved it. If their pupils dilate, congratulations: you just opened a window. Fresh air has entered the chat.