What's a new skill you picked up recently to combat #brainrot ?

"brain rot
(n.) the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration."
(Oxford Dictionary).

This was word of the year in 2024.[1] Now in 2025 with more and more #GenAI assisted tasks, this becomes even worse, as a study suggests.[2]

It is not surprising; in tech we know something called #TutorialHell which discribes the state where you just follow along tutorials believing that you are learning somehting, but as soon as you need to solve a problem yourself, you realize that even after hours of tutorials you can't, because you actually never learned anything, even though you did everything by the letter.

I realized in ~2016, that I've been working in tech for over 10 years, and being so into it, that even for non-tech tasks I would think like I would when programming something and be even surprised if others did not. That was the moment, where I feared becoming what in Germany we call #Fachidiot (i.e. a one-track genious, that's an idiot in everything else).

To combat this, I picked up #日本語 (#Japanese). Just because I found it a real hard challenge. I think, doing something like this is essential: Learn something new, you've never done: a language, an instrument, a motor skill, or - if that is not your field - programming. Important is, that it get's you into doing something completely new, to animate your brain. Because, as it is well known: The brain works like a muscle: The more you use it, the better your mental and intellectual state gets - the less you use it, the more it deteriorates. And with the temptations of our modern world ( #socialmedia #GenAI #workoverload #populism #shorts #doomscrolling etc.) this has become more important than ever.

[1] https://boingboing.net/2024/12/02/brain-rot-is-oxfords-word-of-the-year.html
[2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872v1

#learning