I love learning!

When I was a kid in the 1980s, it was quite common for “My friends” books to make their rounds on the schoolyard. These books consisted of two page questionnaires for your buddies to fill out so you could remember them all. One of the more common questions was “What are your hobbies” and I can’t remember when I started putting “learning” in there but I sure did.

Rather early in my life I noticed that learning new things was a lot of fun for me! Reading up on things in my parents’ lexicon collection, trying my hand at various forms of crafting and getting better at them, and of course also learning everything I could about all the technology all around me felt amazing¹. And that never stopped, rather the opposite: Nothing gives me more dopamine these days than going down a shiny new rabbit hole, absorbing new knowledge like a sponge does water, and then putting it to use right away to work towards acquiring a new skill or solving a problem. Lifelong learning, broadening my understanding of the world and acquiring new skills to then use to make or do something myself² are a huge part of who I am.

I think this is why it baffles me that much how readily people will take every shortcut they can to avoid having to actually learn a new skill or gather knowledge about a new topic. Plenty of people are only interested in the results, only want to be able to say “I did this” without actually having to do all the legwork.³ Maybe out of fear to fail, maybe out of laziness, maybe out of perceived necessity in our capitalism based hustle culture.

And while I’d say that the current genAI craze with all its promises to achieve results without having to put in anything beyond a more or less well defined prompt certainly has made this approach to life more visible, it was always there.

In the end, I just have to accept that not everyone gets a rush from learning something new, as sad as I find that. I just wish that the consequence of this fact wasn’t having to drown in a neverending wave of slop 😐