The rebellion of the humanist students: "We are tired of so much immediacy, we thirst for the search for meaning"

Jorge Maestro, a 36-year-old from Granada, worked as an architect in Qatar, building luxury homes and earning more money than he could have in Spain. But one day he realized that it didn’t fulfill him – “I felt dissociated, it’s a very artificial place” – and decided to return to Madrid and change professions. Now he designs artistic chess pieces. He is obsessed with this game, which for him represents “virtue,” “intelligence,” and “strategy.”

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There came a point when Maestro saw himself “more as a craftsman than as a technician” and gave up a predictable and stable job. “I feel like I’m in a process of searching, and I think there are many young people like me who want to go beyond what society imposes on them,” he says. He defines himself as “a nonconformist who is not satisfied with what he does, what he has, or what he is.”

Maestro is one of the students of Thenomba, an online school where teachers – some of the most representative philosophers, writers, scientists, historians, and artists of this decade – give 15-minute video lessons daily. It is “a master’s for people who want an unofficial life” or “the school that won’t get you promoted in a big four.”

This is how Javier Roca (30 years old) and Javier Fernández (31), better known as Los otros Javis, who are also behind the phenomenon of El Despertar and the Thinkglaos, a kind of TEDx talks where young people can also chat and flirt while drinking beers and sharing pizzas, describe it.

“We realized that, after finishing university, our friends went from spending all day reading to having a single aspiration: to climb to the highest floor of Deloitte,” Fernández explains.

“So we decided to do something that would allow people to stop and reflect, to be inspired humanly, to cultivate themselves inside, nothing about growing professionally or training as leaders. Since we were kids, we have been trained to be productive, not contemplative. But we are the society with the most information in history and also the one with the least judgment. This is not just another master’s, it’s an inner journey. This is not about having, it’s about being.”

“Getting off the wheel”

Thenomba was born in December with zero students and in a few months has grown to nearly 1,000 students, mostly lawyers, entrepreneurs, or engineers who want to “get off the wheel” and “find a purpose.”

Its expansion coincides with a boom in the degree of Philosophy, which has increased in student demand at most public universities: at the Complutense, the cutoff score has risen from 5.940 to 6.373; at Sevilla, from 5 to 7.353; at Santiago, from 5.798 to 7.549; at Oviedo, from 5.306 to 7.566; at Murcia, from 5.386 to 8.564, and at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, from 5 to 5.982, according to the comparison of cutoff scores between 2025 and 2026 made by EL MUNDO.

Campuses are also increasingly emphasizing postgraduate programs that combine philosophy, critical thinking, and anthropology. The Master’s in Digital Humanities at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, the Master’s in Human Condition and Transcendence at Comillas, or the Master’s in Philosophy of Care at the University of Girona are examples.

In parallel, several degrees follow the Great Books Program, an educational model born at Columbia University that proposes training students through reading and discussing fundamental works, whether they are enrolled in Law, Engineering, or Medicine.

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“We are overwhelmed”

“We live in a dissatisfied society, where technology separates us from who we are. With AI, many feel overwhelmed and lost. We are very disconnected from our essence and I, doing this master’s, feel that I have gotten to know myself better,” says Maestro.

“There are many young people who are tired of immediacy and seek spaces of interiority to stop, think, and go inside. We have a thirst for knowledge and a search for meaning,” points out Cayetana de Urbina, an industrial engineer, 32 years old, who works at a large logistics company and feels that “university fell short with the humanities.” She is a student at Thenomba and is also enrolled in a reading club on Italian classics because she believes that “judgment is always under construction” and pursues “getting out of the threshold.”

The rise of humanist students comes at a time of social change, polarization, and generational discontent over the housing problem and low wages. Computer engineer Javier G. Recuenco, a teacher at Thenomba, argues that “the MBA has served for a time,” but “now another time with different circumstances appears and the king of mambo is uncertainty”: “Beyond six months it is impossible to make any prediction and humans are not prepared for this management of uncertainty.”

Philosopher Gregorio Luri, also a teacher at this school, adds that “rigorous knowledge has a therapeutic power for young people, as it provides them with experiences of order.” “We are educating to opine before making the effort to understand. And interpreting the world is not easy at all,” he emphasizes.

Nacho Losilla, 29 years old, studied Journalism at the Rey Juan Carlos University and almost two years ago left the sports streaming company where he worked because he didn’t feel comfortable. “I had a good salary and good conditions but there was a lot of frenzy and the hours were crazy.” While working as a freelancer, he is doing Thenomba.

“I am discovering what I want to do in life. I didn’t like the Journalism degree and now, many years later, I have found the pleasure of learning, not with a utilitarian purpose but because it is stimulating.” Losilla has many friends “discontent with life” because “the promise of ‘having a job after going to university’ was not fulfilled or the promise was fulfilled and it doesn’t satisfy them.”