Why do we want personal curriculums so bad?

We adults yearn for the classroom

Tis the year 2026, and as with any January, resolutions abound. Everyone it seems is making “personal curriculums” and “study plans” for the year ahead, and I’ve felt the same push to open my brand new notebooks and start shouting a bibliography from the top of the stairs. But why? I know I won’t stick to any of it (adhd iykyk), that it will bring me nothing but despair that I’ve abandoned my great plans, and that I’ll have only my half-written notebook pages to dry my tears. AND YET, I’m still absolutely brainwashed that it would solve all my life problems!

At first I thought this was just the usual list effect: if you write it all down, in order, with tiny steps, the world feels so much more manageable. In times of uncertainty, order is calming, and when the problems are the economy and the politics – things you don’t really have power over – discipline of the self is the only variable you get to control. Writing the list itself feels good because you’re thinking of your ideal self (hello new year resolutions!), and we love nothing more than a dream!

Writing and then following a curriculum is a way for us, former good grades kids, to be doing all the things we’ve always wanted to do but had to forgo in order to build a life for ourselves. I’d love to be in academia, and I deeply considered a phd, but even in computer science it wouldn’t pay the bills (neither during nor after graduation). Building a study plan is quite close to the real academic lifestyle of researching whatever you want (minus the awful bureaucracy of trying to get paid of course), and that’s deeply satisfying to my starved brain.

However, I was a bit confused initially as to why this whole thing was taking the shape of the curriculum. We already have the framework of “resolutions” for making better versions of ourselves, and the whole “researching medieval representations of beauty” thing used to be an item on that list, usually stored under “i want to dive deeper into my hobbies”.

My personal theory is that, as we’ve gone deeper into the shitshow irl, we needed the return to the classroom setting, as a throwback to a (fantasized) childhood when all we had to do was be good and study. In reality, you had so many more problems than just studying for the test, but you’re forgotten how bad friendship and baby steps for independence were, so the only memory left is relatively easy to deal with – and studying is something we were so good at!

No more bills or worrying about financial futures, we’re now 14 years old again, except this time we’re so aware of how good we had it and are excited to crack open those books and problem sets! What, of course our curriculums have assignments and essays to write, how else would you learn?

You know what else didn’t exist when we were 14? Tiktok. And as any tiktoker worth their salt will say, your curriculum will only work if you’ve set a narrow, focused, and precise topic to explore. Such a breath of fresh air, to have only one thing to look over, with a set reading list. It’s not just good for anxiety, it’s also excellent to help with overstimulation and that choice paradox of there being way too much “content”, everywhere, all the time.

I’m not making my own curriculum, because i think it’s a very stupid idea to self-direct your studies for a topic you don’t master (but that’s “all or nothing” bit of my brain talking, you can totally diy it without actual risks), but i’m following other people’s! I’m reading Paradise Lost with Carson from GlutenbergBible, and I’m studying – well, will start studying once the book arrives at the bookshop – philosophy about technology from Jared Henderson.

I’m already feeling such relief, by just printing out the accompanying substack essays, setting my phone to charge on the other side of the room, and just reading along! That’s where the curriculum shines too: instead of that one big goal, you’re getting bite sized pieces fed to you, with a sense of completion at each step!

More than that, there’s pedagogy involved (another perk of stealing said curriculum)! It’s not just small tasks to do in order, some very smart people put them together so that they’re the right difficulty, and build up upon each other. It solves what we call in computer science the “tutorial hell”: you keep following along some youtube tutorials, one after the other, feeling like you’ve learned a bit each time. But for real you didn’t learn a thing! The various tidbits you pulled from the algorithm didn’t reinforce each other, didn’t slowly amp up the difficulty, maybe they even gave you contradicting information! The curriculum made by your favorite substackers solves all of this – or at least they promise too, we’re only 4 days into January after all.

That’s the main reason why i don’t recommend making your own curriculum – unless it’s your phd thesis theme, but that’s like, entirely the point of the job soo… If you steal it, it’s been conceived for you, and gently brought to life. Sure you can pick up any book and read it! But depending on your skill level and topic, you might not get a lot out of that. I certainly won’t learn shit from reading Heidegger on my own – I’d give up after 2 pages, and wouldn’t pick up on the nuance of the ideas.

I also think there’s 4 pros to following an online curriculum set by whomever:

1. The parasocial relationship makes you a tiny bit less likely to give up (because you wouldn’t want to disappoint your favorite online person, now would you?!)

2. The live element of weekly/monthly posts helps keep you motivated and forces you to actually take those bit sized pieces. I’m ever so slightly worried about my tech philosophy one, because i’ll be one week late due to freaking icy roads slowing down deliveries, and if i let the bite sized pieces stack up, suddenly we’re back to having a full on book to read.

3. You get to ask questions. I have a burner account already set up (anxiety iykyk), but honestly it’s the internet, so you can just say you didn’t understand shit, can they please dumb it down a bit more?

4. They’re normal, <40 years old people! I can’t say how important that is: while the older generations understand that tiktok is frying our brains, I have yet to see them truly get it inside. Young content creators on the other hand, not only get it, but are trained to write for us. The old university professors, for all their great qualities, aren’t optimizing for declining attention spans – they have other shit to do! But the substackers must, if only because that’s how they’re getting paid. Their posts are, to be frank, understandable even at nighttime before bed, when my brain is at its worst. They’re helpful, candid, making jokes and bolding just the right words to keep me focused.

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Now, the hour is a bit late, and I’ve realized my question on “why curriculums” has not only found a few answers, but also devolved into praise of the not-at-all-personal curriculums, so I’ll leave you here.

I hope you found some interest in this less formal and less edited version of my newsletter! (my personal resolution for 2026 if you can believe it) If you did, I’ll gladly let you add “subscribe to Rose’s Technofable” to your curriculum’s list of tasks, and will give an official A+ to all who ask.

Good night,