This could be from any age really. I remember reading lots of books like Harry Potter as a 4th grader to seem smart to the teachers looking at me but I didn’t understand any of it. When the big YA dystopian boom was happening, I read tons of terrible YA dystopias to seem cool but many of them frustrated me.
When I was a pretentious teen during the height of dystopian YA being a thing I read books like 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, and Anthem so I could seem more intelligent than teens who only read The Hunger Games. I’m still intelligent, but I realized as an adult mocking other people’s interest because they’re mainstream doesn’t make you an intellectual it makes you an asshole.
Hey, at least you learned that as a teenager instead of as an adult. Though as a teenager I adored Fahrenheit 451 and still do. I’ll see people talking about how ‘weird it is for people to walk anywhere’ (maybe because I live in the car-centric dystopia of America) and I think back to that book.