The Death of Curiosity: Confessions of a Disillusioned Teacher

I think I finally reached the point whereby I no longer want to be part of the teaching industry. Because there are no longer people who want to be taught.

I no longer want to have to be a salesman to convince people that learning new things is not only useful but also exciting.

For me the world is full of wonder, and I feel like I’m passionate about way too many things. And when I’m passionate about something, I want to explore that thing, dive deeply into the belly of the subject and dissect every single cell under the microscope, hopefully under the guide of a good teacher. A teacher who is going to make the subject even more enchanting.

I have a lot of studies behind my yoga practice, both physical and philosophical studies but as I see it, there is no longer an audience to receive it.

Consumerism seeped into every little pore of our life, including the fitness industry. People no longer come to class to learn and to continue learning (I thrive on preparing material that flows and builds from class to class), they come to consume. They pay, they want to tick a box, ideally get ‘thrashed’ or ‘burn calories’ but they no longer want to learn.

A gym should be the perfect place to build a weightlifting community but clearly there is no appetite for that either.

Unfortunately, going to the gym became transactional, autonomous and performance driven. That kills any potential for building community where everyone is on their headphones filming themselves.

Note, if you’re looking for the correct bar path in Olympic Weightlifting, then probably there is some reasoning behind it. But do we have to upload every workout to some anonymous audience on social media? Wouldn’t it be nice to actually speak to people who are on the platform next to you? I promise you; I often try to speak to people in the gym, but they often look annoyed at me interrupting their workout. Maybe I should speak to them via their DMs on social media? Perhaps I’d get a better reply.

But going back to teaching, how are we supposed to teach people who only do drop-in classes and just want to do a workout. But you cannot do a workout without learning how to do the prescribed exercises first. Or, how to move your body; how to feel your body; how to recruit the appropriate muscles. And to do so, you must take some time out of the allocated workout time to learn these things. I often feel that people treat the time to learn, to break something down, to have a 3 min demo or lecture as time wasted. Maybe that’s why classes such as Hyrox, where there is not much to learn, you just go in, thrash yourself, where technique is not really needed…are so popular. Granted, it gets people moving but from the teaching point of view…

Teaching drop-in classes is not really teaching.

There is (hardly if any) engagement from the students’ side. In fact, in this capitalist’s world we no longer call students ‘students’, they somehow become clients. If I’m a teacher and I’m not required to teach, then I wonder if playing a pre-recorded tape would suffice?

Joan Cornellà Vázquez

Being a teacher these days also requires you to be an entrepreneur. We are to be great at marketing, video editing, promotion, creating reels and short educational content. Ideally not too long, not too complex, 20 seconds would do. All in our free time and all for free. For the off-chance that someone is going to notice it and decides, again, off-chance, to give our class a chance.

Social media is so saturated with pseudo-educational content that some people, especially the younger generation, believe that they can learn how to exercise off TikTok. Ideally from someone who has many followers because these days it’s not about knowledge and lived experience, it’s a contest of popularity. There is no need to verify references or if those Instagram claims are true; if enough influencers repeat certain things over and over again, it must be true.

Elders are extremely rare to come by. I guess in a capitalist society where the only measure of worth is productivity: when we’re no longer productive we’re deemed no longer useful.

And so, we pack the Elders into the old peoples’ homes to rot. I have to say, I’d never heard of nursing homes until I came to the UK. Like… why would we do that? We cannot learn from our peers! We cannot learn from people who are like us. We can only learn from people who are different, older or more experienced.

But again, nobody needs to learn anything anymore, we can find everything on TikTok…

In fact, as I said, nobody even wants to learn anything anymore. We just want to consume. And then we wonder why we’re so unhappy. Consuming can only give you so much satisfaction. The first donut tastes great but after devouring a fifth one…

With studying, as opposed to consuming (content), we can never get enough.

But the problem is, we are no longer encouraged to study things that we are passionate about; only the subjects that will ‘bring return on our investment’. Capitalism seeped through everything.

When I was doing my matriculation, I was utterly engrossed in physical geography. I loved this subject. I wanted to study geography. But no, I was told to do five years of Economics – a topic that not only I wasn’t interested in, but I also wasn’t very good at either (most likely because I wasn’t interested in it). Needless to say, I never worked using my master’s degree.

Just imagine, if only I was allowed to study what I was passionate about. Maybe today I’d be a leading climate specialist and an activist. Both topics are close to my heart.

After looking at the current status quo, it’s clear that we no longer live under capitalism per se, we’ve now entered its more extreme version: neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism transforms citizens into consumers and turns social life, education, health, etc. into profit driven machines. Throw in some individualism and we’re cooked. As yoga / fitness coaches we are no longer teachers. We must view ourselves as businesses or "enterprises" that must self-improve to remain competitive.

We’re fed the ‘American Dream’ propaganda that if only we work ‘hard enough’ we’ll be successful. Any failure is deemed as a personal failure, not the system failure.

But the system DOES NOT work. As things are going, with the profit driven self-entrepreneurship and competition driven society, we no longer are able to perceive joy. The professional name for this state we’re collectively in is anhedonia. The definition of anhedonia is a reduced ability to experience pleasure or interest in previously enjoyed activities, often described as emotional numbness or a "flat" feeling. 

No wonder we are no longer interested in anything anymore. After spending our days being self-optimised machines, we want to numb even more. Any form of excitement is no longer driven by our curiosity towards the world but rather short respites from the oppression of our boring but oh-so-productive lives.

Studying for pleasure is not the only part of life that got hit by neoliberalism. There is a huge decline in reading, lack of appreciation for arts, (apparently nobody cares about ballet or opera according to Timothée Chalamet’s nonsense), I could go on.

So, going back to teaching, perhaps that’s the reason why there is such a high turnover amongst teachers/fitness professionals. Unless you are desperate or cannot see any other way of making a living, you most likely get totally disheartened and leave.

Jovan Srijemac, Saatchi Art