The start of a new year always arrives with a strange mix of urgency and hope. We are encouraged to reset and become better versions of ourselves almost overnight. However, I feel that somewhere between academic deadlines, career pressure and the constant hum of notifications, “learning” of any sort has quietly slipped out of our hands.
This year, instead of promising myself intense productivity or unreal perfection, I decided to return to something more foundational: learning as a way of life. Not learning for grades or résumés but only because it keeps our mind steady, stretches the imagination, and reminds us that we are more than what we produce. So I created something I now call my yearly personal curriculum – a plan to learn beyond classrooms and career tracks. It isn’t rigid but deeply personalised. And in many ways, it feels like reclaiming a part of myself that modern life almost convinced me I didn’t have time for.
Why Learning Started to Feel Exhausting
Let’s be honest about something many of us quietly feel: learning has become exhausting in ways we never anticipated. We live in a time of constant information, lectures at double speed, articles summarised by AI, and explanations reduced to bullet points. Cognitive psychologists describe this as learning fatigue. We are learning more but understanding less. Our brains are constantly stimulated but rarely nourished.
Add to this the rapid integration of AI into academic and professional spaces. Tools that were meant to assist us have slowly become default substitutes for thinking. Even in college, many students hesitate to explain a basic concept without using a prompt. When effort disappears, imagination takes a hit, innovation dips and ental health suffers too This isn’t a rejection of technology but a call for balance.
The Idea of a Personal Curriculum
The concept of designing your own curriculum isn’t new. Long before universities formalised education, people practiced self-directed learning as a way of living. Aristotle believed education should cultivate virtue and curiosity, not just skill. Leonardo da Vinci carried notebooks not because he was required to but because his mind demanded exploration.
A personal curriculum begins with a simple but radical question:
What do I want to understand better about the world and myself this year?
Learning to Nerd Out and Not Apologise for It
There’s also an important unlearning that must happen before meaningful learning can begin: unlearning the fear of being seen as a “nerd.” For many of us, that word carries emotional residue from high school corridors and teenage years, when enthusiasm was mocked and curiosity made you stand out in uncomfortable ways. We learned to dilute our interests so we wouldn’t appear too intense, too invested, or too much.
But one needs to slowly rewrite the script. When you look closely, people doing the most interesting work and living the most fulfilling lives are the ones who unapologetically nerd out. They care deeply. They ask questions. They read obsessively about obscure topics and find joy in it. Choosing a personal curriculum is, in many ways, choosing authenticity and allowing yourself to be fully interested without worrying about how it looks.
The quiet realisation that arrives in your 20s is this: being genuinely curious isn’t uncool. And being yourself, fully, enthusiastically, is not something to grow out of.
Learning Music: Discipline Disguised as Art
One of the first items on my personal curriculum this year is learning how to play the piano. My goal is to learn at least one classical piece, preferably Beethoven.
Neuroscientific research shows that learning an instrument enhances neuroplasticity, improves emotional regulation, and strengthens memory pathways. But beyond science, there’s something profound about playing music composed centuries ago. It is said that Beethoven created some of his most powerful work while losing his hearing. It teaches patience in a world obsessed with speed.
Women’s Health: Learning What We Were Never Taught
Another essential pillar of my curriculum is women’s health, an area astonishingly underrepresented in mainstream education. Most of us were taught complex formulas but not how our hormonal cycles function. We learned to push through pain without understanding its biological roots.
Medical research consistently shows that women’s pain is underdiagnosed and often dismissed. This year, I’m learning about cycle-based nutrition, gut-friendly meals, mental health, and stress physiology. This knowledge feels empowering. When you understand your body, you stop fighting it and start working with it. That shift alone can transform how you move through life.
Art History: Learning to See Beyond the Frame
Another point on my curriculum is studying art. Not passively scrolling through museum images but understanding paintings across cultures and centuries. Who created them? Why? What political or personal consequences followed?
Art is not decoration. It is documentation. Studying Frida Kahlo teaches you about pain, gender, and identity. Studying Picasso’s Guernica teaches you about war without reading a single statistic. Research suggests that engaging with visual art improves empathy and critical thinking. More importantly, it teaches us to sit with complexity, something modern life rarely allows.
Sport, Time, and the Skill of Patience
Physical learning deserves a place in any curriculum. This year, I’ve added lawn tennis and archery, two sports that demand presence in different ways. Tennis sharpens anticipation and emotional regulation. Archery teaches stillness, breath, and focus.
These activities will eventually help me with something subtler: time management and patience. Learning something new forces your brain to work with time rather than against it. Neuroscience shows that the brain adapts through consistency, not intensity. Yet many of us are wired as perfectionists. If we’re not good immediately, we quit.
That impulse isn’t truth but mere conditioning. Real learning requires patience with yourself. You learn to show up even when progress feels invisible. Over time, your brain rewires itself to tolerate discomfort and trust the process over outcomes. That patience spills beautifully into every other part of life.
What AI Took and What We Must Reclaim
AI has transformed learning, offering speed and accessibility. But it also tempts us to bypass struggle entirely. Imagination weakens when answers arrive before questions fully form. Innovation slows when effort is outsourced. Mental health suffers when self-trust erodes. Educational psychology consistently shows that productive struggle is essential for deep learning. When effort disappears, confidence follows. A personal curriculum reintroduces effort gently, on your own terms.
Romanticising Learning as a Way of Living
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow explains how immersive learning reduces anxiety and increases life satisfaction. Philosophy echoes this. The Stoics believed a life spent learning was a life aligned with virtue. When learning becomes ritual, piano practice at dusk, reading about art before bed, understanding your body over breakfast, it stabilises you.
A New Year, A Deeper Way of Becoming
This year, I’m not chasing achievement. I’m building depth. In a world that constantly asks us to be faster and louder, choosing to learn feels radical.
Perhaps that is the most meaningful resolution of all:
to keep learning, not because you have to, but because you get to.