Self Education: Your Best Defense Against Brain Rot

This is me teaching myself Latin and piano and cooking and herbalism and literary theory. Why? Because social media is rotting my brain and I want it back. The modernist writer Virginia Wolf once said, "Thinking is my fighting." She was talking about fighting World War II, but I would argue we're in the midst

of a war right now. A war for our attention, our literacy, our discernment, our very cognition, and thinking is our best defense. maybe our only defense. I never used to be much of a social media user, but during isolation, scrolling the feeds became awfully seductive. Watching real after real, Tik Tok after Tik Tok

distracted me from my loneliness. It made me feel like I was still connected to the world. It took me years to notice that my memory was shot. I was reading less. I stopped journaling and came up with exactly zero interesting writing ideas. I found myself constantly wondering, "How do I get back to who I

used to be?" Little did I know that the way back was something I've been doing my entire life in one form or another. And you probably have, too, learning stuff. You don't need to go back to school, hire a private tutor, or sign up for some Instagram guru's business course. As long as you have an internet

connection, a notebook, a little bit of time, and a lot of motivation, you too can reclaim your brain with self-education. And by the end of this video, you'll have a simple four-step framework to get you started. But first, what we talk about when we talk about brain rot, brain rot, the Oxford dictionary's 2024 word of the year,

which is concerning in and of itself. The dictionary defines brain rot as the supposed deterioration of a person's mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as a result of the overconumption of material, now particularly online content, considered to be trivial or unchallenging. also something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration. That's a