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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
People are assigning themselves homework — for fun
By Harmeet Kaur, CNN
Updated:
8:00 AM EDT, Sat September 13, 2025
Source: CNN
It’s been more than five years since Clare Yeo got her masters in
piano performance, but this fall, she’s assigned herself a semester
of coursework.
Yeo, 33, is studying the relationship between good and evil through a
series of classic texts: Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Crime and
Punishment” and “The Idiot,” William Shakespeare’s “The
Tempest” and Hannah Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on
the Banality of Evil.”
Outside of her day job as a copywriter in Singapore, she says she
spends about two hours a night reading and taking notes on what shapes
our ideas about heroes and villains. And at the end of the year, she
plans to write an essay about it.
Yeo is jumping on the trend that’s bubbling up on TikTok and other
social media. In recent weeks, several creators have been sharing
self-guided study plans and reading lists, setting off a delightfully
wholesome domino effect. People are exploring weighty questions like or
; they’re in English and Korean; they’re examining . There are no
grades and no hard deadlines, just the pleasure and satisfaction that
comes with enriching your mind.
For many participants, this is a way to fight “.”
Though Yeo actively posts her personal curriculums on social media, she
puts her phone away around 9 p.m. and dedicates herself to the stack of
books before her.
“I think it is tiring to get these bursts of 90-second clips in your
eyes all the time, and it’s so overstimulating that people want that
slowness,” she says.
Rediscovering a love for learning
On TikTok, the personal curriculum trend appears to have started with
Elizabeth Jean.
The 32-year-old says she’s always been naturally curious, but as a
child, school often left her feeling anxious and unintelligent. Setting
her own pace and choosing what she wanted to learn about helped her
reconnect with her inquisitive side as an adult.
“I can pick it up and put it down whenever I want,” she says. “It
genuinely nourishes my soul so much.”
In June, she pored through self-help texts such as Esther and Jerry
Hicks’ “Money, and the Law of Attraction,” Julia Cameron’s
“The Artist’s Way” and Jen Sincero’s “You Are A Badass.” In
July, she studied baking, as well as manifestation, spirituality,
psychology, dreams and the inner self. This month, she’s reading John
Green’s “Everything Is Tuberculosis” and watching the 2015
documentary “The Forgotten Plague.”
When Elizabeth Jean (who did not want to be identified by her full
name) shared her personal curriculum practice on TikTok a few months
ago, the idea seemed to resonate. Commenters asked how she comes up
with her units of study, how she keeps track of them and where she
finds the time.
“Seeing someone doing all this random stuff is in a way maybe giving
people permission,” she says. “They remember that they can also
just do random stuff.”
The enthusiasm around personal curriculums and independent learning
might reflect modern-day anxieties. Faced with the noise of social
media and endless demands on our time and attention, many of us feel
we’re losing our ability to focus and think clearly.
When Eleanor Kang graduated college and started spending her workdays
toiling away at spreadsheets, she fell into a habit of mindless
scrolling and rewatching “Grey’s Anatomy” for the umpteenth time.
“It was making me feel like nothing in my life had meaning,” she
says. “I really found myself not able to form my own opinions the way
I had before. A lot of things felt very murky for me, and that kind of
terrified me.”
Seeing her grandfather, a former professor, lose his cognitive
abilities to Alzheimer’s disease, as well as seeing her peers offload
critical thinking to ChatGPT, was also a wake-up call, Kang says. She
vowed to recapture her attention span and consume media more mindfully:
making reading syllabi, reading an essay each morning, pausing her TV
rewatching habit to only watch Criterion Collection movies for three
months. Kang’s efforts culminated in the cheekily titled Substack
series “” — her first post received more than 40,000 likes and
was shared thousands of times.
Yeo, who posts about books on TikTok and Instagram, similarly felt her
sense of self slipping away. Earlier this year, before the personal
curriculum trend took off, she took a self-imposed break from social
media to rediscover her own tastes and relearn how to articulate her
thoughts about what she was consuming.
“I need to not just understand what my worldview is, but also to
understand all the news that I’m being inundated with and distill it
for myself in a way that makes sense to me,” she says.
When she returned to social media about a month ago and saw so many
users endeavoring to learn independently, she found it was just what
she needed.
The structure of school, without the pressure
Personal curriculums attempt to recreate the structure of academia —
without professors or classmates.
Still, some people are finding ways to make their personal curriculums
a communal experience. Yeo’s course on good and evil sparked so much
interest among her followers that she’s since formed a weekly book
club around it — hundreds of people joined the first meeting, she
adds. The pressure of leading the discussion has also made her more
diligent about doing the reading and absorbing it.
The book club has helped replicate the intellectual community that
she’s missed since leaving school.
“When do we get to talk about film theory, for example?” she says.
“If it’s not happening in your daily lives, when do we really get
to get together as a community to discuss these things that isn’t
frivolous at all, but feels that way because it doesn’t seem
immediately applicable to work or relationships or all the things that
we’re dealing with in real time?”
Personal curriculums may turn into another passing social media trend.
And without the accountability of an academic environment, people may
ultimately abandon some of their projects.
But at a time when strains of are on display in pockets of society, and
at a time when all else in the world feels overwhelming, Yeo says
she’s moved to see people express so much interest in educational
pursuits. People aren’t making personal curriculums out of some
hollow drive for productivity or relentless optimization. They’re
putting down their phones — at least for a little — and dedicating
precious free time to learning for fun.
“It’s not trying to get you richer or get you into a certain role
at work,” Yeo says. “People wanting to dive into these more
philosophical questions is really uplifting, and it gives me hope that
the humanities live on.”
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