In 2026, when everyone wants to be interesting, far fewer people are actually interested in something.
That difference reveals a deeper problem in contemporary culture. In an age of constant self-presentation, personality has become something to display. Taste is rarely allowed to remain private: the book on the desk, the film that was watched, the song on the Instagram story and the cause linked on your social media page can all become evidence of a carefully assembled self.
Being interesting now works as a form of cultural capital, which sociologist Pierre Bourdieu defines as cultural capital, or nonfinancial resources such as education and cultural knowledge that can produce social advantage. In today’s culture of display, interestingness often works through the logic that the right interests can make a person appear more valuable before those interests have had time to become meaningful.
This pressure is especially visible online, where identity is built through display. Social media platforms reward visibility so that interests can become part of a public image almost immediately. The 2023 U.S Surgeon General report found that 95% of people ages 13 to 17 use a social media platform, with more than one-third saying their use is almost constant. A person can seem literary by posting a book they barely read or they can seem politically serious by reposting a take they barely considered. These gestures are not automatically empty as outward taste can reveal genuine feelings and style can reflect real thought. The problem begins when interests are valued mainly for what they say about the person who holds them.
Sianne Ngai’s “Our Aesthetic Categories” offers a useful way to understand this shift. Ngai treats the “interesting” as an aesthetic judgment that makes sense within a culture shaped by performance and consumer life. If there is an automatic belief that something is worth circulating, it can get rapid attention online without a deeper, understood attachment. People can use these momentary, feigned interests to seem interesting without ever fully immersing themselves in said interest.
Being truly interested in something is outside of the self. Genuine curiosity begins with the belief that something deserves attention before it becomes useful to one’s image. Reading a book out of interest is not proof of sophistication. A culture obsessed with appearing interesting ultimately makes that kind of humility harder. Sociologist Sherry Turkle’s work on online personae helps explain this shift, since she describes digital spaces as places where people create multiple representations of themselves. Under that logic, the encounter becomes secondary to how it helps construct a visible self.
There’s also the event of people wanting to belong, while also wanting to appear separate from the crowd. People reach for niche films or obscure references because these things allow them to appear different in recognizable ways. Even originality can become formulaic once everyone learns the same methods for signaling it.
Research on the effects of social media exposure have found that seeing idealized versions of others online can produce negative self-evaluations. People begin to wonder whether their interests make them seem intelligent enough, original enough, or even culturally aware in the first place, and curiosity becomes contaminated by self-evaluation. The harm is not only that people feel worse after seeing idealized lives online, but that they learn to approach their own lives from the outside, asking how they appear before asking what they actually experience. In a culture built around performing interestingness, even the inner life begins to feel like something that must be optimized for an audience.
To be truly interesting requires a person to let something matter before it becomes useful to identity. Psychologists Richard Ryan and Edward Deci describe curiosity and exploration as forms of intrinsic motivation, meaning they are driven by the satisfaction of the activity itself rather than by an outside reward. George Loewenstein’s information-gap theory also explains that curiosity begins when a person becomes aware of a gap between what they know and what they want to understand. In both accounts, curiosity is valuable because it draws someone into a relation with something beyond their current image of themselves. A culture of performing interestingness reverses that movement as interest starts to serve as proof that a person has taste or distinction and becomes yet another tool for managing how the self appears.
Jacqueline Lee is an Opinion Intern for the spring 2026 quarter. She can be reached at jacquhl3@uci.edu.
Edited by Geneses Navarro.
