I'm a Systems Reliability and DevOps engineer for Netdata Inc. When not working, I enjoy studying linguistics and history, playing video games, and cooking all kinds of international cuisine.
If your sole goal is different ways of thinking, just studying linguistics in general can be helpful, but not as much as actually immersing yourself deeply in a variety of languages.
The simple fact is that most people have trouble actually internalizing the different ways of thinking if they don't have to use them themselves or spend a lot of time focusing on them.
As a really easy example, the general concept of using kinship terminology preferentially to abstract pronouns (as for example done in Thai and Indonesian) is something that I, as a native English speaker who has studied linguistics extensively can conceptually understand, but I still can't think in that manner without heavily focusing on it. I have similar issues with the concept of measure words from Mandarin Chinese and number forms changing based on what you're counting as in Japanese. These concepts are something I generally understand, but they're sufficiently alien to the way I normally think that I can't effectively utilize them without making a significant effort.
In contrast, I've spent enough time studying Esperanto that I have no issues whatsoever in thinking in the rather terse, highly information dense conceptual framework that the language was built around (which, combined with the number of different languages I've studied at least a little, has lead to me randomly register switching in spoken conversation for single words just to try and express exactly what I mean, much to the consternation and amusement of my friends and family).
Looking at this a bit differently, fluency in a language is just another skill. If everyone used the logic of only learning skills that they needed, very little would get done in the world, and quite a few rather significant inventions may have never been created. You should absolutely learn things that interest you, it will help expand your ways of thinking, and you never know when it will be useful.
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If your sole goal is different ways of thinking, just studying linguistics in general can be helpful, but not as much as actually immersing yourself deeply in a variety of languages.
The simple fact is that most people have trouble actually internalizing the different ways of thinking if they don't have to use them themselves or spend a lot of time focusing on them.
As a really easy example, the general concept of using kinship terminology preferentially to abstract pronouns (as for example done in Thai and Indonesian) is something that I, as a native English speaker who has studied linguistics extensively can conceptually understand, but I still can't think in that manner without heavily focusing on it. I have similar issues with the concept of measure words from Mandarin Chinese and number forms changing based on what you're counting as in Japanese. These concepts are something I generally understand, but they're sufficiently alien to the way I normally think that I can't effectively utilize them without making a significant effort.
In contrast, I've spent enough time studying Esperanto that I have no issues whatsoever in thinking in the rather terse, highly information dense conceptual framework that the language was built around (which, combined with the number of different languages I've studied at least a little, has lead to me randomly register switching in spoken conversation for single words just to try and express exactly what I mean, much to the consternation and amusement of my friends and family).
Looking at this a bit differently, fluency in a language is just another skill. If everyone used the logic of only learning skills that they needed, very little would get done in the world, and quite a few rather significant inventions may have never been created. You should absolutely learn things that interest you, it will help expand your ways of thinking, and you never know when it will be useful.