Gen Z Didn't Invent Knowledgemaxxing. They Just Stopped Lying About It.

Here is the uncomfortable truth: everyone is knowledgemaxxing. Gen Z just turned it into a bit. Millennials turned it into burnout. Boomers turned it into a LinkedIn post in 12-point Calibri.

Knowledgemaxxing is simple. It's the rebrand of something older than Wi‑Fi. Taking in more information than you can possibly action, convincing yourself it's "research", then wondering why your portfolio looks like a charity for unprofitable business models.

And yes, I've done it too. In 2021, I spent 3 months "deep diving" Web3. Translation. Eight hours a day in Discords, Twitter Spaces and whitepapers. I told myself I was "building conviction". What I actually built was a 5‑figure position in a governance token that did a friendly 80% drawdown. That is a £14,300 tuition fee I paid to learn one basic lesson.

More information is not the same as better decisions.

The cult of recreational research

Here is what's new. Gen Z took "learning" and turned it into lifestyle content.

Polyester Zine called it "knowledgemaxxing" and framed research as a leisure activity, "undisciplined and playful" rather than graded and credentialled. TikTok is full of "Spend a research day with me" and "Topics I'm researching this week" videos. It looks like a lo‑fi study vlog. Underneath, it's a quiet revolt against brain rot and bullshit. polyesterzine

There is data behind the vibe. Oxford picked "brain rot" as its 2024 Word of the Year after usage spiked 230%, defining it as the supposed decline in mental state from consuming trivial content. That's not a meme. That is a generation diagnosing its own cognitive hangover. edition.cnn

But here's the contrarian bit. If you think this is a Gen Z phenomenon, you have not looked in the mirror.

Millennials invented this behaviour on RSS feeds and Medium. Boomers did it with Sky News, the FT weekend and 14 "must read" business books a year. The packaging changed. The addiction to input did not.

American Press Institute data says 79% of Gen Z and Millennials consume news daily and 96% at least weekly. That is not a vibes-based, feelings-first generation. That is a cohort chain‑smoking information. thevarsity

The question is not who is reading. The question is who is thinking.

Your portfolio is a museum of half-read ideas

If you want to see the cost of bad knowledgemaxxing, open your brokerage account.

Every line item is an artefact from some content rabbit hole.

You listened to three AI podcasts and bought the top of a SaaS name trading at 30 times sales.

You read a Substack thread on "energy security" and now own a fossil stock that has done nothing but pay you a 3% dividend and emotional regret.

You watched one 12‑minute YouTube explain‑like‑I'm‑five on quantum computing and bought an ETF whose top holding is a company that sells more press releases than products.

I did this with "metaverse infrastructure" in 2021. The deck looked beautiful. Total addressable market allegedly in the trillions. The P&L was less beautiful. Revenue flat. R&D ballooning. Cash burn heroic. I still bought. Why? Because I had consumed so much content about "the inevitability of virtual worlds" that saying no felt like I was missing the train.

Twelve months later, the position was down 72%. The market had not mispriced the future. I had mispriced my own overconfidence.

This is the core bug. Knowledgemaxxing without constraint turns into narrative addiction. You think you are doing due diligence. You are actually doing mood boarding.

Boomers do it with CNBC, Zoomers do it with Substack

There is a smug take floating around that Gen Z is uniquely broken by short‑form content. Yes, TikTok has rewired attention spans. Roughly 40% of under 30s now use TikTok as a regular news source and around 60% of TikTok's billion‑plus users are Gen Z. That matters. stackoverflow

But The Atlantic points out that younger Gen Z readers are also checking out more print books from libraries than older cohorts. BookTok, the corner of TikTok dedicated to books, helped push Colleen Hoover to over 2 million copies sold in a single year. NYT‑level bestsellers, off the back of teenagers crying into front‑facing cameras about paperbacks. theatlantic

So no, they are not illiterate. They just do not care about your canon.

Meanwhile Boomers sit on 24‑hour news and call it "staying informed". I grew up in Delhi watching older relatives watch business channels the way teenagers now watch Twitch. Same energy. Different medium. Same output. A lot of noise, a few trades, and a deep sense that the market is unfair when it does not reward your favourite narrative.

Gen Z at least has the honesty to label low‑value content as "brain rot" and then build "anti brain‑rot menus" and "doomscrolling cures" to climb out of it. Half of them openly say social media is harming teen mental health and wish they had spent less time on their phones. When was the last time a Boomer admitted CNBC made them panic sell? stylus

The real edge isn't more knowledge. It's filters.

The quiet part nobody in tech wants to say out loud in a funding meeting.

You are not under‑informed. You are over‑indexed on other people's conclusions.

The McKinsey and Reuters crowd will tell you Gen Z is "visual‑first" and consumes news through "edutainment" formats like GIFs and quick videos. True. But Millennials are no better. We mainlined blog summaries, Twitter threads and podcast hot takes through the 2010s and called it "staying ahead of the curve". blog.quintype

The result. Everyone knows the same surface‑level facts. Everyone quotes the same three charts. Everyone makes the same trades a week too late.

The edge now is not being the first to know. That was 1998 behaviour. The edge is being the first to stop caring about 90% of the noise.

Gen Z's "commonplace books" and offline film logs are interesting because they hint at this. Taking notes by hand. Logging what actually stuck. It is not aesthetic. It is a filter. thegoodtrade

Boomers had filing cabinets and cut‑out FT clippings. Same idea. The difference is that this generation is starting to recognise that curation is not something The Algorithm does for you. It is something you do yourself if you want to keep your brain and your balance sheet intact.

How to knowledgemaxx like an adult

So what do you do if you are a Millennial or Boomer who has been cosplaying as an analyst via Instagram carousels and quarterly earnings memes?

Three rules. They are boring. They work.

1. Put a hard cap on inputs. If American Press Institute says 79% of your cohort is taking in news daily, assume you are already saturated. Pick two primary sources and one longform format. That's it. For me it is one newspaper, one industry newsletter, one podcast. Everything else is dessert, not dinner. thevarsity

2. Assign every idea a price tag. Before you "go deep" on a theme, write down what it will cost you if you are wrong. In capital, in time, in emotional energy. My Web3 tuition fee was £14k. If I had written that down at the start, I would have cut my position size in half and treated the rest as speculative R&D spend, not conviction investing.

3. Separate research from entertainment. If you find yourself consuming content because it makes you feel smart, log it as entertainment, not due diligence. Entertainment is fine. Just do not let it near position sizing.

Knowledgemaxxing is not the enemy. It is the default state of an economy where information is cheap and attention is the scarce resource. Gen Z's real innovation is that they have stopped pretending this is purely noble.

The rest of us need to catch up. Not by learning more, but by admitting that half our "research" is just sophisticated procrastination dressed in a nice font.

Once you see that, you stop trying to out‑read the market.

You start trying to out‑filter it.