"Seeking knowledge is obligatory upon every Muslim."
— Prophet Muhammad ﷺ (Sunan Ibn Majah)
That hadith has been rattling around my head lately. And I've been thinking about what it actually means to seek knowledge intentionally, rather than just passively consuming whatever the algorithm decides to serve me that day.
I spend a lot of time learning. Or at least, I spend a lot of time consuming content that feels like learning. But there's a difference between those two things, and I've been avoiding confronting that difference for a while now.
So I'm doing something about it. I'm building a personal curriculum. Six months, structured study, actual deliverables at the end. No degree, no certification, no external validation. Just me, actually engaging with ideas I care about, in a way that might actually stick.
Day one is tomorrow. Let's talk about how I got here.
The problem (or: why I feel like my brain is rotting)
I'm not getting dumber. That would be dramatic. But I am spending a frankly embarrassing amount of time on YouTube and not retaining much of it.
I watch The Pursuit of Wonder, The School of Life, oliSUNvia, Shanspeare. Good content. Educational, even. Video essays that make me feel like I'm engaging with interesting ideas. But there's a difference between consuming and studying. Between entertainment that happens to be smart and actual intellectual development.
When I finish a video essay about, say, the philosophy of Camus, I feel like I've learned something. But ask me to explain it a week later? I've got maybe a vague sense and a few disconnected quotes. That's not knowledge. That's just... vibes.
And it's not like I'm watching trash. I'm genuinely interested in this stuff. But the format of passive consumption means nothing sticks. I'm not taking notes, I'm not connecting ideas, I'm not building anything. I'm just letting information wash over me and hoping some of it stays.
It's giving intellectual equivalent of fast fashion. Consume, forget, repeat. Not my best look.
The rabbit hole problem
I am a naturally curious person. Always have been. Jack of all trades, proudly. I've never wanted to be an expert in just one thing. I want to know a lot about a lot of things. I want to be the person at the dinner party who can contribute to any conversation.
I'm also fortunate to have friends who'll happily fall down rabbit holes with me. My friend Debo is probably the one who humours me most. We've spent literal hours discovering the most random things.
Badeshi, an unclassified Indo-Iranian language spoken by only three people in northern Pakistan. Three. The BBC found them in 2018 and documented some phrases before the language disappears entirely. We went deep on that one.
Separately, we found Brahui, a Dravidian language that somehow made it all the way to Balochistan. Completely isolated from the other Dravidian languages in South India. How did it get there? Why is it still there? We spent an entire afternoon on that.
We've gone deep on Gabon because we realised it was a country we knew nothing about. The Cavendish banana and why every banana you've ever eaten is genetically identical (and also probably doomed). Random etymology. Why certain words exist. Where phrases come from. Literally hundreds of topics over the years.
These rabbit holes are genuinely one of my favourite things. The curiosity, the discovery, the "wait, what?" moments. Debo will text me something like "did you know..." and we're off for hours.
But most of these rabbit holes end with a conversation, and then I'm lucky if I remember half of it a year later. It's intellectually stimulating in the moment, but there's no structure. No depth. No retention.
I don't do anything academic anymore. And I miss it.
The brainrot is real
There's this TikTok trend I've been seeing. People talking about feeling like they're getting dumber. Calling it "brainrot." The sense that constant scrolling and passive consumption is actually degrading your ability to think deeply.
I don't think I'm experiencing brainrot in the dramatic sense. But I do feel like I'm not using my brain the way I could be. Even in school, I never really felt challenged. But at least there was structure. There was a curriculum. Someone else had decided what I needed to learn, and I just had to show up and do it. I'm good at my job, but there's no external structure pushing me to grow intellectually.
The internet tricks you into thinking you're learning when you're actually just consuming. Every video essay, every Wikipedia rabbit hole, every podcast. It feels productive. It feels educational. But if you can't recall it, articulate it, or build on it... it wasn't really learning.
I've been coasting on curiosity without actually developing my thinking. And that needs to change.
The spark
A few things converged recently that pushed me from "I should do something about this" to actually doing something about it.
First, a conversation with my friend Asfa. She mentioned she was building her own curriculum. Just casually dropped it into conversation like it was a normal thing to do. I immediately loved the idea. We talked about different areas of interest, how to structure it, what success would even look like.
The idea of taking your education into your own hands. Of not waiting for some institution to tell you what to learn. Of just... deciding what you want to know and then systematically learning it. I don't know why I hadn't thought of this before.
Then she mentioned the TikTok trend. Turns out there's a whole movement of people doing this. Classically Clare, Olivia Unplugged. Learning for the sake of curiosity. Not for a degree, not for a job, not for LinkedIn clout. Just because there are things worth knowing.
The trend seems to be a response to exactly what I've been feeling. A lot of us "old nerds" (and by old I mean like... mid-twenties, which is deeply embarrassing to type) feel like we need to do more learning for the sake of just doing things we find interesting. Not everything has to be optimised for career growth. Some things can just be... enriching.
And then there's becomingali. He's London-based, shows up on my feed constantly, and I find his approach to lifelong learning genuinely inspiring. This was the video that first took me down the rabbit hole.
He reminds me of myself. The thoughts I've had over the years about wanting to learn languages, study philosophy, actually read the books I buy. Except unlike me, he's actually doing it. And documenting it to help others.
Seeing someone else actually execute on the vague aspirations I've had for years was the push I needed. If he can do it, I can do it. The only difference is that he started and I haven't. Yet.
So I'm doing it too.
The actual plan
I could just read more books. Watch more documentaries. Go down more rabbit holes with Debo. But that's what I've been doing, and it's not working. The problem isn't lack of interest. It's lack of structure.
So I'm giving myself structure. Six months. One theme per month. Actual deliverables at the end.
The thread connecting everything: how meaning is created, encoded, transmitted, and distorted. In language, belief systems, societies, and machines.
This sounds pretentious. It probably is. But every subject I'm interested in touches this question:
- Literature → meaning through narrative
- Etymology → meaning through words
- Philosophy → meaning through reasoning
- Islam → meaning through moral structure
- Geography / Ethnology → meaning through lived context
- Mathematics → meaning through abstraction
- AI Philosophy → meaning without consciousness
They're all lenses on the same thing. And given I work in AI, building infrastructure for systems that process language without understanding it, the question of what meaning actually is feels pretty relevant to my day job too.
Six months. January through June 2026. By the end, I want something to show for it. A mini-thesis or a recorded talk. Something I can point to and say: I studied this. I understood it. I can explain it.
The honest bit
5-6 hours a week. That's it. This is a structured hobby, not a second job.
I'm generally an inconsistent person. I get excited about things and then lose interest. I start projects and don't finish them. So consistency is going to be my biggest challenge. But if I get to month 6 with something to show for it, I'll be happy.
Part of me thinks this is embarrassing. Building a "personal curriculum" feels very self-serious. Very "I'm not like other people who just watch Netflix, I'm cultivating my intellect."
But I'm sharing it anyway. Accountability helps. And maybe if you've been feeling the same way, seeing someone else try this might be useful.
So here we are. December 31st, 2025. Tomorrow is day one.
I'll write an update in a few months. Hopefully with proof I actually stuck with it.
Either way, I'm done just consuming. Time to actually learn something.