Comment by underlipton
15 hours ago
As always, it is good to be aware that many people are too anxious about more existential issues to comfortably an consistently expend effort on intellectually-taxing tasks that aren't perceived as directly related to their survival. If it's an issue with social values, it's less of one related to learning as it is to perpetuating artificial scarcity.
>to comfortably an consistently expend effort on intellectually-taxing tasks that aren't perceived as directly related to their survival.
the average person spends 6(!) hours a day on their smartphone, the average TikTok user spends 100 minutes on the app alone. This isn't about artificial scarcity, it's about the average person looking like the Wall-E people
Escapism and making a concentrated effort on something are two different things. Yes it would probably be good if you could flip a switch and use the small windows of time we look at our phone per day to study OCaml, but it's not really realistic..
People who are asking these questions are saying "will me spending my time learning OCaml help me land that job that pays six figures and has health insurance so I can not rot away living on the margin". They aren't saying "I only do things that will make me money".
>use the small windows of time we look at our phone
again, it's not a small window. It's six hours. That's almost half your waking day. People spend virtually their entire leisure time rotting away on low quality entertainment.
>will me spending my time learning OCaml help me land that job
that's a pointless question for one you never know if something will land you a job, new opportunities don't open up before you do something, secondly the relevant question is, should I stop doing X and start learning Ocaml, or Chinese, or take a welding class because all of that even if it doesn't work out beats scrolling through Instagram.
I don't even take offense with the idea that you engage in activity that makes you money, because pure selfishness on that front would be an improvement to what most people are doing now.
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Even if those statistics are correct, I do think you're ignoring that smartphone apps are specifically engineered to be low-friction and highly-addictive, and pushed specifically to the people who are anxious about spending money on other pursuits (free time often being necessary but insufficient), as they contend with the artificial scarcity (which this is absolutely about) of affordable housing, affordable food, affordable transportation, affordable guided education, etc.