By Harmeet Kaur, CNN

(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 personal curriculum 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 how capitalism shapes female identity or how beauty intersects with the laws of physics; they’re building their vocabularies in English and Korean; they’re examining the art of the chocolate chip cookie. 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 “brain rot.”

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 “How To Get Smart Again” — 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 anti-intellectualism 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.”

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2025 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.