It’s no secret that I love to spend my time learning.
I find myself doing something different every single day, including reading a couple articles entirely on Wikipedia — even if it’s something I couldn’t care less about, or that I will never use in my day-to-day life. I once spent a lesson in my art class reading about Vincent van Gogh when I was in Year 9 because I had nothing to do, and I ended up reading the whole article out of pure boredom.
I was surrounded by Japanese culture growing up, I am not Japanese, nor visited the country itself, but I have an older sister who was very well into anime, food, and the J-pop industry — my eldest is the same, but with South Korea instead. I ended up beginning to learn the Japanese language when I was 10, I can still read Hiragana and Katakana, but I fall ill with Kanji apart from the basics. I used to be into anime quite a lot, most notably with Black Butler and Tokyo Mew Mew — though I watched the English dub of the show, “Mew Mew Power“, on Pop Girl.
I’m not into anime anymore, unfortunately, but my passion to learn never left.
Over the years, I have dabbled in anything you can think of — animation, coding, language learning, etc. Most recently, I’ve been learning how to code; specifically HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — all these three languages are essential knowledge in order to build and create websites. I’ve a friend who is an amazing coder, and I receive feedback and criticism for each project I complete.
However, I feel that the passion to continue learning how to code has died, including the spark of joy that comes with learning anything.
Why? I have a couple theories.
I’ve always loved learning languages, as you can tell. I used to use Duolingo for whatever language I was learning at the time, and it’d be the only thing I’d use other than Memrise and and YouTube. Sadly, Duolingo has fired almost most of their employees and decided to go down the route of using AI for their courses.
And that’s the problem — I’m not motivated to learn anything because everything now relies on AI to create their courses rather than making them handmade themselves.
Of course, there is several types of AI in the world; but the most dangerous one out there is generative, AI that creates images, videos, music — you name it. Generative AI is incredibly bad for our environment as it takes up gallons of water in order to create whatever prompt the user has given to the machine. There are thousands of data centers in the world, and all of them contribute to why global warming and climate change is increasing — and it’s all because people nowadays cannot use their willpower to be creative.
GenAI is bad for the environment, it’s amazing how the sun hasn’t exploded yet. I’ve always been against GenAI, and I have never, and won’t touch it even if I’m stuck on something.
Duolingo and Memrise have now resorted to AI — what now?
All other language sites have tutors, assistants, and courses created by AI itself. Every single YouTube video I watch about a specific topic always include said YouTuber to recommend using ChatGPT, Claude, or Grok in order to help you learn about said topic — but I don’t wanna do that. The reason why AI is dangerous is because it’s impacting the human mind’s ability to think and make their own decisions; not only that, but there have been cases of people dying due to AI-related reasons, and I will get into why AI is incredibly dangerous down the line in another post.
So, what options do I have left?
I could do things the old fashioned way; getting a couple of textbooks and notebooks in order to study a topic I want, or type up notes online — but as someone who suspects that they have ADHD (which is common for people who already have Autism like me), I can’t go one minute without switching tabs or doing something else instead, even if I didn’t have any devices on me. I also, most of the time, don’t have my own space or privacy, and I fear people snooping as my corner is already exposed enough. I could also delve deep into the internet to try and find sites that don’t include AI in their courses, but that’s going to take four weddings and a funeral to get there.
I could also switch English into my target language in video games, devices, and all that; but they’re only good for learning new words, especially if you play a sandbox game like Minecraft for instance.
This doesn’t just apply to language learning, it can apply to anything you desire to learn.
What about Anki? italki? I used to use italki growing up, especially for languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Norwegian — I obviously never excelled in any apart from Japanese, but they were expensive to maintain a couple days a week, and having one lesson per week wasn’t going to get me far, either. Anki, on the other hand, also wasn’t my kind of thing.
I feel the only choice I have left nowadays is stick to watching vlogs in my targeted language on YouTube, listening to music, and either cramming the language in my head from textbooks or physically forcing myself to go outside to go do a course — if I wasn’t living in a town with barely anything, that is. I’m not one to use apps in order for you to converse with natives, mainly because I don’t exactly like interacting with people all that much, meaning that I’d have to talk to myself alone.
I’m led to believe that another reason why I don’t feel motivated enough to learn is due to depression.
I’ve struggled with the condition for a good 11 years now, and I used to draw a lot on pen and paper growing up, but stopped around my teenage years because I didn’t have the energy to continue, especially since my teenage years were nothing but pure hell. Of course, I do suffer with other mental health issues, but depression is also a major factor in this situation, as it can impact the ability of someone’s enjoyment towards things they love to do.
I have been wanting to learn Blender for several years in order to make animations, but I never fully get into it — Blender itself is a hard program to learn and navigate, and it’s definitely not impossible, but it feels like it. I remember starting with Blender Guru, who is the creator of several doughnut tutorials, but he unfortunately, ended up being not just an arsehole, but also went down the road of creating a Blender plug-in that generates prompts users type in with AI. From experience, I never learnt anything from the series, and ended up doing my own thing instead.
I also like to write, obviously. I opened up this blog out of personal enjoyment, and the transition from using Weebly to here has been a struggle, but it was worth it in the end. I like to write fanfics about my interests, including my favourite characters and ships. I used to do that quite a lot, but as always, I’ve done less over the years.
How about Geography? I do GeoGuessr frequently, I know the ins and outs of the UK at this point, and since I also look at very beautiful pictures all over the country on Geograph every single day, and it’s the only site where AI pictures aren’t present with all photos being taken by various photographers — which leads onto my next tangent, which is that I want to learn photography… except that I have no clue where I should take the photos.
I have considered spending an entire day in Nottingham and see what kind of photos I have taken at the end of the day, but I also don’t know any good spots in the city enough to take any. I don’t have an up-to-date camera, either. The one I hold currently is an Olympus E-500 that came out in 2005, and I definitely don’t have enough money for a new one as they are incredibly expensive. Heck, I even considered taking a photography course at Nottingham Trent University just because I thought it’d be fun.
I have tried Open University a couple of times, but always ended up dropping out. So I tried local collages in my area, and I still dropped out. I don’t think educational environments are my thing, as I prefer to learn in my own time rather than be in a class full of other students and teachers pressuring me to do things I don’t want to do. I had to drop out of my functional skills course due to lack of support in Math and not being allowed alternatives with my social anxiety for a presentation in English.
In fact, I don’t really know what I want to do with my life, to be honest. I have so many interests that I want to pursue, and I don’t want to stick to one thing for the rest of it.
When I was in school, I always loved doing my work and learn in various subjects. I was that kid who never broke any rules nor messed around in class, but that’s because I was already getting messed around by other students. My school experience was horrendous, and it’s something that I vow to never visit if I ever end up building a DeLorean myself.
I briefly had a music career for a couple years, but quit because admittedly I’m insecure of how I sound, and that it was becoming increasingly difficult to produce instrumentals by myself, especially as someone who is moderately deaf.
I spent an entire week learning about analogue televisions, and the switchover from satellite to digital.
I watched various videos on YouTube about different switchovers all over the world, and some countries still haven’t switched to digital and rely on satellite entirely. I know quite a lot of errors for different handheld consoles and how to fix them, I’ve learnt about how to build computers and how to overclock them — anything you can think of, I most likely know what would be the issue.
I own one of Sony‘s Walkmans, specifically a WM-BF40, and their CFD S05 CD and cassette player. I also own a Samsung DVD player, a Pebble H1080, which is a player that I had growing up. I also own a red Game Boy Pocket, alongside other little bits and bobs that I purchased over the years. I’ve always wanted a Zipit Wireless, but they are incredibly rare to come by online.
I’ve learnt quite a lot of trivia and useless facts that nobody would really care about, but I learn about them anyway.
I had the idea of creating jewellery for my own sake, but then couldn’t after attempting because I have weak fine motor skills with my hands, and eventually just lost interest in the idea afterwards. I had the idea of opening up an Etsy shop dedicated to making creations out of Hama Beads after I had so much fun designing and creating characters as gifts for the Here & Now cast earlier this year in April, but the little space and privacy I have at the moment makes it difficult.
I think I’ll end up finding myself learning something I’ve wanted to learn for ages eventually, but with AI trending alongside being neurodivergent and a couple of mental health conditions really impact on the way I feel about studying or practising my skills, and it’s incredibly frustrating that I can’t seem to push myself to do so. The only way I’ll have to is by either forcing myself to learn by hiring a private tutor, or wait until I’m 50 and realise that I’ve wasted my golden years doing nothing, which in return boosts the dopamine in my brain to do something.
But you know what I’ve learnt recently? I’ve learnt how to be independent.
I’m in the process of learning various bus routes in my area, and I’ve learnt how to use the trams in Nottingham in case if I wanted to go out on my own instead of relying on other people to drop me off somewhere — though I still find myself having to do this sometimes, depending on the time of day and how accessible it is to get to a specific area.
I personally believe that I haven’t done too badly, but it is a bit anxiety inducing sometimes. I’m getting a bit more confident outdoors, though.
This was a long ramble, but I feel I needed to get it out there.
