In the so-called elite narratives circulating on social media, nothing is more elegant than the image of coding with one hand and reading Shakespeare with the other. Picture it: late at night in a café, CUDA kernels pulsing across the screen on the left, an open copy of Hamlet resting just so on the right. It happens to be exactly the recipe that certain elite-education pipelines hold most dear. This “polymath” persona is incredibly seductive because it precisely taps into an ancient craving: to announce, through a self-narrative that is sufficiently romantic and sufficiently deep, that you belong to a particular kind of person. The Shakespeare-and-code combo just happens to supply that narrative, hinting that you possess both the hardness of logic and the thickness of a soul. Change the era, change the circle — the symbols will change, but the craving won’t. The logic of this class signaling is typically built in two steps. First, technical depth establishes that you are not at the same intellectual level as ordinary people — after all, those who can truly master such things are few. Second, a layer of romance and depth gets draped over that foundation, announcing that you are not just a clever executor but a person with a soul. Of course, some skip step one entirely and begin right at step two. For them the technical work doesn’t matter; what matters is that innate spiritual temperament. Ordinary programmers, meanwhile, are the implicit control group in this narrative: they understand the technical but stop there, so they remain mere tools. Only the elite who possess both intellect and soul are truly scarce.
Note: this piece isn’t about people who genuinely love both — it’s about those who use the liberal-arts pose as class signaling.
Why are so many people obsessed with Shakespeare? I don’t think it’s because those words actually strike them — it’s because the image of “a person who reads Shakespeare” carries an indefinable, aristocratic aura that hovers above the merely practical. (The symbol can of course be any other piece of literature or art.) But this kind of consumption of the humanities is precisely the greatest misunderstanding of what it means to be cultured. The real Shakespeare is anything but gentle — he lays bare the bloody workings of power and the darkest corners of human nature, and those who actually read him tend not to become more romantic, but more unsettled. Here, the humanities become a shared marionette for two camps: some technical people use them to dress up the monotony of a technical identity, while some artsy people use them to plaster a facade over an intellectual void. Together they build an absurd consensus — that a liberal-arts sensibility is a “vibe” that can exist independently of rigorous logic, a posture to be struck rather than a field to actually enter. It’s like the many people who love talking about sustainable development — they can recite carbon-neutrality slogans by heart, yet can’t even explain how the most basic energy system actually works. The symbol gets consumed, but the substance behind it is never touched.
The most intoxicating delusion of class signaling goes like this: when someone dresses themselves up with labels like “deep” or “romantic,” they aren’t trying to cover anything up — they truly believe the image is who they are. They don’t think they’re performing; they think they simply are that kind of person with both technical chops and a soul. The most insidious toxicity of this class signaling is that it instrumentalizes humanism — dulling the rigor of the technical while hollowing out the depth of the humanistic. Embracing mediocrity is, frankly, everyone’s right. Choosing to coast through four years — or even a lifetime — or admitting that you simply see a given thing as a way to earn a living, is a form of honesty toward your profession and toward yourself. Calmly accepting that you can neither read the logic of code nor sit through a Shakespearean sonnet is, in fact, far more noble than this superiority that papers over reality with an image.
The core of this class signaling mentality, I’ve long felt, is mistaking the fantasy of depth for depth itself. I once saw a biting critique from a professor at Texas A&M about a parallel phenomenon in academia:
Some people look down on researchers who churn out one small paper after another, spending years thinking they’re brewing a breakthrough on the level of Kaiming He or Fei-Fei Li. Then, when they finally produce something, they realize it’s not even as good as what big labs casually churn out on the side.
In reality, those who look down on this kind of prolific, incremental publishing and those who pride themselves on being cultured share the same superiority: both are using an imagined identity of “the kind of person I am” to look down on people who simply do the work. The ones who genuinely spend a decade sharpening a single sword in academia are always the ones brave enough to take on hard problems and slug it out in uncharted territory — not the ones hiding behind the banner of long-termism while wallowing in self-congratulation. Using a liberal-arts pose as an elite badge is just another version of the same vanity.
I have always believed that deciphering the ancient pronunciation of a word is just as important as discovering a minor planet. This is because dignity in any field is born only of the labor pains of solving complex problems. Rather than pretentious cultural name-dropping, I would much rather see someone weigh the tension in a word the way they wring every drop of performance out of code — always with reverence for underlying logic, chasing that pure truth that refuses to be defined by disciplinary boundaries. And if you find yourself drawn to neither? That’s okay too, because calmly accepting your own ordinariness often requires even greater courage. After all, true elegance has never been about living inside some carefully constructed persona — it is the willingness, always, to embrace that imperfect but real self.
Appendix: A Short Honesty Checklist
In a place like UWC, where expectations run sky-high, it’s hard not to get swept up in some “perfect elite” narrative. If you have ever wondered whether you yourself might be doing a little Class Signaling, try sitting alone late one night and gently asking yourself a few questions:
On the audience: If no one in your life ever knew what you were reading or studying — if no one gave you any credit for your “liberal-arts polish” — would the words or the logic still move you on their own? If that pure joy is gone, it may be because you have been carrying a script written for someone else’s eyes.
On superiority: Have you, somewhere beneath the surface, been using this interdisciplinary identity as a defense mechanism? When you hit a wall in one domain, do you soothe the setback by telling yourself “at least I have depth elsewhere”? Real depth is not a step stool for looking down on others; it is the ground beneath your feet when you walk through a valley.
On sanctuary: Are you consuming a symbol, or experiencing the spirit behind it? Whether you retreat into books or retreat into code, admitting that you are tired and need a space to breathe should be encouraged. What we need to distinguish is this: are you seeking a sanctuary that lets you keep living, or building a moat that advertises how different you are?
On awkward honesty: Do you allow yourself to be inelegant? Real exploration of any field is almost always clumsy in its early stages. If you cannot bring yourself to admit that you are, in some field, really just a fumbling beginner — because it would damage some persona you’ve built — then the persona itself has become the shackle on your growth.
A final word:
There is no shame in needing a persona from time to time; it can even serve as a social lubricant. But stay vigilant — do not let those signals become the wall between you and the real world, or between you and your real self. This piece is not meant as an indictment of anyone who opens a book between coding sessions. Quite the opposite: in an age where everyone wants to be the protagonist of some perfect-elite narrative, what I would rather pay tribute to is the courage of those who can admit they did not really understand Shakespeare, and the honesty of those who can calmly accept that their code is, in the end, nothing special. Because we never need to reach for another kind of altitude to cover up our truest selves.